In a crowded field of games both about fishing and that have fishing in them, the simply named How to Fish has surprisingly managed to reel people in. As I write this, it’s got over 127k players on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of over 370k, and its numbers have only been steadily rising since it launched on August 20, with overwhelmingly positive user reviews. It sold over a million copies in two days. People are calling it (affectionately) the latest friendslop hit, a game to play with your buds where everyone can hang out and get real silly for hours.
I was curious, so I checked it out, and died to a freakishly huge Spider Crab within about five minutes.
How to Fish is…well, certainly about learning how to fish, or how someone with a steady diet of action movies and no experience with fish might think fishing works. You begin with your boat crashing on a tiny island inhabited by you, some clams, and another guy who can sell you some bits of junk in exchange for the fish you catch. You need that junk to buy a crab fishing rod and a beer can for bait, which you can then use to fish up the aforementioned Spider Crab that’s been terrorizing this poor man. Make sure you give the man the beer and don’t drink it yourself like I did, because apparently if I drink beer, I drink the can, too, and have to start all over. Anyway, this fellow wants you to kill the Spider Crab for him, and in exchange you can have his boat and escape the island. Seems simple enough, except the Spider Crab is really freakin’ huge and will murder you in a couple of claw swipes. All creatures come out of the water swinging, you see, and you have to put away your rod and engage them in fisticuffs to defeat them and ultimately “catch” them.
Anyway he clawed the living daylights outta me, and then I was out a beer can and had to painstakingly fish up crabs and pick up clams to earn money for another beer can.
Except this time, I noticed that the guy also sold some brass knuckles. Okay, now we’re talking. I collected enough clams and crabs to buy those too, equipped them, and went pugilist on the Spider Crab again. Once again it demolished me. Back to the drawing board: fortunately, this guy also sells a knife for $45. Each clam is worth $1. A crab is $2. A rare shrimp is $4. This will take a while. I also have to buy the beer can anew each attempt. It’s $12.
This is How to Fish! It’s a game about beating up undersea creatures with weapons. You sell fish to buy better equipment, which you need in order to fish up and fight bigger and better creatures, which you need to progress to new islands, and so on. The first island just has melee weapons, but the locations that follow don’t waste too much time in giving you access to guns with which you can shoot fish or seagulls or whatever. You can do sick tricks like reel in a fish, flip it out of the water all cool-like, and shoot it in midair. You can also do “trick shots” for money, where you cast your rod in a particularly cool way, bouncing it off stuff or curving the cast or what have you. Later on, you can gamble (fake, in-game money only) too.
I do not think this is a game meant to be played by yourself. It was the middle of a workday for me, so I really had no choice. I think this is a game where a group of friends are meant to gang up on a Spider Crab together and wallop it with their fists and/or brass knuckles. I can kind of see the appeal, I guess, though I was surprised to discover that How to Fish, unusually for a “friendslop” game, is a one-off: it’s a campaign you can finish in a couple of hours, rather than a game you can play endlessly like Peak. Even so, I found dozens of comments from players who pointed at its cheap price-tag relative to how fun it was as a big draw:
They’ve got a point! I will note though that How to Fish is actually $8, and even if the developers of Peak are correct that $8 is basically $5, the actual $4.95 discount price tag is only available for a few more days. Now that I own it already, maybe I’ll see if I can’t get some friends to help me with that Spider Crab problem.
