Fishing Vacation

Genre: Sports (Fishing) / Horror / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Fishing Vacation is a Fishing game with Horror elements released on PC in 2022 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game puts you in the role of a guy whose friend has invited you to join them at their uncle’s mountain cabin for a few days of lake fishing, though it doesn’t take long for it to become apparent that there are creepy and macabre things going on around the cabin.

While this is certainly a Horror game, I suspect there aren’t many likely to be scared by it. This is because the game makes use of simple 2D pixel art visuals and sound that are clearly designed to imitate the classic 4-color Game Boy handheld, or perhaps its Super Nintendo counterpart, the Super Game Boy – players can swap between multiple palettes and change the border to a few different options. And as befits this presentation, the game uses simple chiptune sounds for its creepy music, unsettling sounds, and a cheesy digitized voice announcing with each catch: “You caught a…”

While the simple 4-color visuals aren’t likely to frighten anyone, that’s not to say that the presentation fails. Quite the contrary, Fishing Vacation is quite charming in a goofy, nostalgic sorta’ way, coming across like a five year-old trying to tell a scary story around a campfire. Despite that events within the game (largely just implied) can be gruesome, this (surely deliberately) inept attempt to scare comes across as adorable, and every laughable jump scare and heavily-digitized sound effect just helped to keep a smile on my face as I was playing the game.

Of course, this isn’t just a Horror game, it’s a Fishing game too, although that element of the game honestly feels like a means to an end, as if this game was posing as a Fishing game to try to sneak up on you and surprise you with its Horror elements (don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler – the game deliberately does a very poor job hiding this). It takes some trial and error to figure out the mechanics behind the game’s fishing, but once you do, there’s no challenge to it, no variety, no strategy. Just aim for a dark spot in the water, go through the motions, and you’ll have more or less the same experience whether you’re catching a bass, a lobster, or a great white shark (yes, in a freshwater lake. Like I said, this game is delightfully silly), and that experience will involve a lot of Mario Party-style stick-rotating and button-mashing. There’s also a worm-catching minigame that’s amusing, but quickly grows tedious and repetitive. Yeah, as I indicated, the actual Fishing gameplay just isn’t all that great here.

However, even if the Fishing gameplay is mediocre, and the scares fail miserably, I don’t think either of those things was ever the point of Fishing Vacation. Odd as it may sound, while this game fails as a Fishing game and fails as a Horror game, it is nevertheless well worth playing as a charming overall experience, a fun little thought experiment asking the question, “What would it be like if someone made a Fishing Horror game on the original Game Boy?”. And while a playthrough of the game can be completed within 30-40 minutes and all three endings seen within a few hours, this game’s low $2 price tag makes it seem fairly reasonable. If you’re open to something quirky and original but brief, Fishing Vacation is worth a look.

tl;dr – Fishing Vacation is a Fishing game with Horror elements designed to look like something created for the original Game Boy. If that mix of elements strike you as ill-suited to both a Fishing game and a Horror game, your suspicions are correct – this game doesn’t do either of those things well… but that’s also kinda’ the point. Rather than being about those, this game is all about creating a delightfully silly mood based on its eclectic clashing of disparate elements, and simply for this unique mood alone, I think this game is well worth its low $2 price tag.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Sports Game, Best Misc. Game, Most Overlooked (No Metacritic score for any platform, no OpenCritic score), The “Wow, this game was way better than I expected!” Award

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