GONE Fishing’s best review is eight words: had my eardrums shattered by a pufferfish explosion.
The second best is six: I am now afraid of nighttime.
The third is in a bad mood and runs to two words, in capitals: STUPID SPIDER.
You cast your line to feed an ancient eldritch beast.
It does not care who is feeding it, only that it is fed.
Every day you have to sacrifice a certain quantity of fish if you want to survive. That is the whole game, and it is a terrific idea, because it turns fishing, the most contemplative activity there is, into an obligation under time pressure.
You are not fishing for pleasure. You are fishing because a thing in the water is hungry.
And the store page notes the bit that matters: the beast is not the only thing out there. Be wary of territorial beasts, stalking nightmares, and ambushing predators.
Over a hundred species to catch, and dozens of live animals to use as bait.
Then you decide your catch’s fate: grill it, smoke it, turn it into a pearl, or bet it all in the gambling pit.
So there is a gambling table in a horror fishing game. I do not know who had that idea but it is excellent, because it gives you a way to lose everything that is not dying.
Surplus gets sold, and the profits pay for upgrades, better gear and items from the traders scattered around the map.
The game plays solo or with friends. As often, players are unanimous that it is markedly better in company: one review sums it up nicely as a goofy fun game, less fun single player, but a blast with a group of friends and a few beers.
Because fishing and horror have one thing in common that nobody had exploited: waiting.
Fishing is sitting still watching a surface of water hoping something bites. A horror game is sitting still watching the dark hoping nothing moves.
Those are exactly the same ten seconds, with opposite emotions. Putting both in the same scene is a design idea that costs nothing and produces the entire game.
Add that you are at the water’s edge, at night, with your back to the forest, and you understand why a player with forty-nine hours simply writes that he likes to fish and to get scared, and this game does both for him.
3,377 positive reviews out of 3,716, or 91 per cent. But the remaining 9 per cent say things worth hearing, especially on the eve of a 1.0.
The crashes. One player simply asks for the crashing every five minutes to be fixed, and promises to change his review afterwards. That is the most urgent complaint.
The balance has shifted. A player with five hours writes that the game was made much harder and got worse for it. That is the permanent risk of a long early access.
The sound mix. An otherwise enthusiastic player wishes he could turn down the screaming creatures without touching the master volume, explaining he does not need ten thousand per cent volume in daytime when some creature is just coming to take a fish off him. That is an accessibility request, and a perfectly reasonable one.
Monster intelligence. One unhappy player calls it the worst he has seen, and another wishes the monsters could not fit inside the house. Those are design complaints, not bugs.
And the tone divides. A player who came for a genuinely scary game finds it is actually a meme game with bad mechanics, and accuses the positive reviews of being ironic.
He is wrong about the irony and right about the tone: GONE Fishing is not a serious horror game. It is a funny game with frightening moments, which is not the same thing. The most positive reviews describe it as a blend of Lethal Company and a fishing sim, and that is exactly it.
The game leaves early access tomorrow, after sixteen months.
That is the right moment to write about it, because it is precisely when a studio decides which complaints it fixes and which it leaves.
Crashing every five minutes and the volume of the screams are both fixable. Monster intelligence and the difficulty curve are choices. We will find out tomorrow which were made.
At 8.99 euros, for a game that already has over three thousand seven hundred reviews and keeps 91 per cent of them positive, the arithmetic is simple.
Take it if you have two or three friends and an evening. Do not take it if you want a real fishing game, or a real horror game: this is a joke held seriously, which is a category of its own and one of the best.
Had a fish stolen by something you never saw? That is the job, tell us on the InsertCoins Discord.