playing the good part of lifestyle sims without the baggage

If you’re just somehow here to be told if the game is good or not, I’ll first answer with a disclaimer: as of version 1.08, this game is broken as hell, and not even in an endearing or entertaining way, but in the kind of ways that you just sort of thought every engine knew how to handle correctly. The two big ones are that borderless forces itself to be on top of every other window, thus defeating the entire point of borderless as a kind of fullscreen that makes alt-tabbing easier, and perhaps more egregiously to me specifically, the entire keybind system being nonfunctional.

I don’t use default keys, ever; I’ve been using ESDF for my movement keys in games since I was 12,^{[1]Link to footnote 1} and I’m not particularly keen on relearning 16 years of muscle memory, so every game I’ve played since then on mouse and keyboard has to let me rebind to it, or I’m not likely to play it. This looks like it does at first, except the moment you try to rebind move left, it resets move right, and vice versa. I don’t know why it does this; at first I thought it’s because I was still using some of the original WASD keys, but it also likes to do this for a bunch of other random keys, so something about it just fucks up in general?

Anyways, even in the rare event you happen to set all the keybinds in the menu to play nice to fit your control scheme, you now have to re-apply them every game start, and also a lot of the actual binds in the game don’t exist in that menu anyways, being effectively unchangeable. I’m going to be real, I’m pretty sure this menu was a last minute addition, because every single interact option still pops up with [E] like there was only one hard-set control scheme.

I am, as a result of this, using a comically stupid control scheme involving having to hold down a mouse button to move forward, because that way it still kind of feels like something I’d do with auto-run in FFXIV. It feels very stupid, and if you explicitly require the ability to rebind every key for accessibility reasons, this is a complete dealbreaker, not least of which because it has zero controller support to play around it.

I need to emphasize this, because it didn’t stop me from playing anyways. The mere fact that I’m still willing to not only not refund, but dump over a dozen hours into, a game where I can’t even bind my keys correctly is the highest possible praise I could give.

The setup to WEBFISHING is as easy as it can get: It’s the fishing part of Animal Crossing, and it’s literally only the fishing part of Animal Crossing. Because it’s uncompromising in that fact, ditching everything else in the process down to the NPCs (if you want social interaction, you’re bringing real-life human beings with you), it gets to have something slightly more complex than pressing A at the right time to catch a fish, though only by a few layers.

Once you snag a fish, you hold down the left mouse button to move the bar that pops up, and you mash every time you hit a wall with a number next to it. These can be upgraded to count 50 per-click, and because these can get insanely high–I’ve had a wall of 1400 pop up at one point–you’ll probably need it, as fish get more rare. Your reward for this is a fish, possibly cosmetics/titles to go along with unique fish, and an Animal Crossing-style gag, though unlike Animal Crossing, these reach far more into the territory of actual jokes than puns. My favorite one is the man o’ war catch, which, instead of having a traditional joke, simply reminds you that in real life they can just fucking straight-up kill you, and every cosmetic tied to catching them is a means of making you look dead for emphasis, which is way funnier than if there was an actual joke.

There’s other tiny stuff here, perhaps most notably a lottery ticket side-game that function like real life instant lottery tickets, and exactly two buckets that automatically catch two fish very slowly, but that really is just it. No daily shit you have to do or you lose out, no punishment for not giving too much of a care, and even the hyper-optimization that kills the point of most lifestyle sims isn’t really here, as there’s only two kinds of fishing areas, and the most the game really expects out of you being to look out for rain clouds and drink a buff every 5 minutes, with those mostly just resulting in a slightly higher chance for more expensive fish.

To me, that lack of anything else might be the appeal. I’m not against optimization and taking games seriously! I adore it in games where that optimization makes perfect sense, but there’s always been something about how people do it in Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, like you’ve taken games whose entire premise is escaping the tedium of spreadsheets and capitalism, and you’ve re-added the spreadsheets and capitalism back in. I don’t want to do that, and when the game sometimes feels like it can take forever to instead do the stuff I want to do, weeks or months–either virtual timespans, or real-life ones–I’ll always be tempted to hunt for those stupid island bugs in Animal Crossing New Leaf, even if I know I’ll get so bored out of my mind that I’ll probably hate the game for another few years.

You can, hypothetically, make a lot of money in WEBFISHING, but it’s either for cosmetics you don’t really need, or fishing upgrades… meaning, you fish to spend money to do more fishing, that you’re already doing. Once you’ve done upgrading all your abilities, and you’ve gotten all the good lures, you can spend it on, like, face parts, I guess? Some shirts you won’t wear, because you already picked your favorite one thirty minutes in? Does that really matter? Not really, and that’s good! Sometimes I don’t want a game I have to care about, and that’s what this is. It’s a game where so much of it is an invisible dice roll that even with all my neuroses, and my innate desire to take everything from fighting to party games seriously, I can just decide “yeah I don’t care that much” and unwind the fuck out.

This, not so coincidentally, makes it the perfect multiplayer game, convenient since you can throw up to 12 people in the same island. Since it’s cheap enough to make convincing people easy,^{[2]Link to footnote 2} I highly recommend getting 4-5 friends who need an excuse to hang out on discord to buy this game, play it together, and then chill out, while occasionally hearing at least three of them scream at the top of their lungs as you jumpscare the entire island from covering their whole screen with your freshly-caught FIFTY METER LEEDSICHTHYS, before you put it into a fish tank that was absolutely not designed for something that size.

In some sense, by removing all the busywork, I’d wager it’s a better social game than the very social lifestyle game it took much from. Funny how that works, right? All these lifestyle sims having a thousand little systems, and all these “casual” experiences that demand constant attention, lest a virtual dog chastise you for being away for a few days, and my favorite social game in the current moment really is just a game that’s explicitly too low-budget to be anything else besides its main draw.

It’s not complex, not actively forcing your engagement. All it is, is a stupid little fishing game, with stupid little extra toys, and sometimes one of those toys is a special blue punching glove that uppercuts your friends so hard you can take them out of bounds.

Maybe more games need to be this stupid.