How to Fish is a fishing game where the physics is the joke
3 min read
Fishing in most games is a minigame with a timing bar. How to Fish makes it physical, hands it to four people at once, and then adds bosses.
Physics instead of a timing bar
It is a one to four player physics-based fishing simulator. While drinking and boating you crash into a small island, and to work your way home you have to learn how to fish. Fish them, kill them, sell them. You start with no gear and no weapons and earn money for better equipment.
The word doing the work is physics. A fishing minigame is a rhythm test with a fixed outcome — you either hit the window or you do not. Physics fishing has no window. The rod, the line, the fish and the boat are all objects being simulated, which means the failures are specific and often funny.
That is also why it scales to four players. A timing bar cannot be shared, but a boat can, and most of the comedy in physics games comes from someone else’s object arriving where yours already was.
Progression is a straight line and it works: quests and bosses unlock new islands, where the creatures are more dangerous and the gear is better. There is a rare variant of every fish to collect for the people who want a list.
Why the feel is the whole game
Secrets of game feel and juice is the load-bearing reference here. In a physics comedy the tuning is the content. Weight, wobble, the give in the line and the sound of a landing are what separate a game people quote to their friends from a buggy one they refund.
How Overcooked’s kitchens force you to communicate is the multiplayer half. Four people on a small boat is a shared-space problem before it is a fishing problem, and the boat being unstable is the design, not a bug to be smoothed away.
The bosses are the part that could go either way. Fighting a large creature with fishing tackle is a great idea if the tackle stays the verb, and a much weaker one if it turns into a shooter with a rod skin.
What you actually get
How to Fish is by Dazed Games, self-published, out now on Windows, under Action, Casual, Indie and Simulation. The store page is written with the same tone as the game, which is usually a good sign that someone knows what they made.
The loop is small and honest: fish, sell, upgrade, go somewhere worse. That is enough structure to hold a co-op session together without pretending to be an RPG.
If the appeal is a group of friends failing at a job with physical objects, Dear Passengers is the other one on this list — crewing the world’s worst airline, with one of you flying and the rest holding the cabin together.
