Heather Flowers has done it again
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A man in a life jacket and torn-off cargo shorts stands on a rowboat holding in one hand a fishing rod and in the other the demonic-looking fish it has caught. All around the rowboar, vicious-looking fish and other sea creatures rise from the water, intent on the stoic fisherman's blood. Above in bold lettering spidered with cracks is the text "FISH FEAR ME".
I had a lot of fun with Snake Farm, the old darling of the Cohost set, and I was prepared to have a lot of fun with its follow-up (more of a spiritual successor than a direct sequel). But Fish Fear Me, released yesterday, is so much more than just Snake Farm on a boat. While it shares the sardonically apocalyptic writing and the broad structure of hunting dangerous beasts across a week's time, it's also got a tremendous amount of depth that makes it feel immensely tantalizing to dive into over and over.
There are of course the most explicit ways in which the game draws you forward: unlike its predecessor, it has a persistent currency that allows you to become more powerful over time, as well as quests that unlock new build options and even new regions to explore. I haven't sailed to the end yet, but there are hints of an overarching metagame quest beyond just "play a bunch of games and pay off your life debt", which I'm very excited to see. And I don't want to downplay these—they're great additions and give the game a sense of exploration over time that Snake Farm never had.
But what interests me more are the emergent ways that it generates depth. The core mechanic is, hilariously, a use of the most standard fishing minigame in video games: hold a button as a line moves and release when it's in a particular region. But doing this consistently while also navigating your boat and murdering fish presents a serious challenge: if your eyes are on the fishing minigame, it's difficult to maneuver in more than the roughest strokes. If your eyes are on your boat, it's difficult to reliably succeed at the fishing minigame.
As a result, you end up shifting your own human skill allocation between different parts of the game, constantly adjusting how much you care about seeing more fish versus how much you care about killing those fish and collecting their remains (not to mention other concerns like where to fish, whether it's fished out, your own health, and so on). It's an astonishing amount of depth for such a simple mechanic, especially one that also works as a cute reference to so many fishing games of a different nature.
Fish Fear Me is out now, and as I write this it's even on sale for $8. You should go buy it, and play it, and tell all your friends.