Hey! You know what would be an awesome game idea? You know Duck Hunt, right? Well, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could shoot fish you caught while fishing? Too bad, it already exists.
Vlambeer is becoming one of my favorite game developers, producing some of the most fun games I have ever played. With the zaniness of Luftrausers and the challenge of Super Crate Box, Vlambeer knows how to make fun games. Of course, Ridiculous Fishing, one of their most profitable games, continues the fun but in an almost disturbing way.
As mentioned before, Ridiculous Fishing is Duck Hunt but with fishing mechanics. Basically, you catch fish and then when you reel in your victims, you proceed to tap your phone screen and shoot all of the fish you just caught. Funny enough, you are rewarded money for shooting the poor fish. However, shooting or killing jellyfish reflects negatively to your bank.
As you gain more money shooting fish while discovering new varieties of fish, you scope out new zones to fish, and with each new zone you find more new fish. Soon, your fishing line becomes equipped with a chainsaw, allowing you to go deeper into the sea, a hair dryer, which alongside the toaster, kill all the fish on screen to let you go deeper into the ocean, and a whole variety of other objects to help you catch them all.
With each new fish, you’re going to have to be able to shoot each one down. Luckily, you have access to all sorts of guns like giant ray guns and bazookas, alongside your trusty magnum and shotgun. The power of your guns is so overwhelming that you can launch a fish all the way to the moon! Of course, trying to shoot down all of the fish you just caught, which is a lot of fish, can be troublesome when there’s only one of you and over 9000 of them.
Ridiculous Fishing really is ridiculous because no real person can get away with shooting thousands of fish in a single go after a successful catch. But it highlights something potentially deeper than we could ever think of. The visual design of Ridiculous Fishing is simple and clean but each fish has a distinct ugliness attached to the clean vector graphics. From simple tadpoles to big jellyfish, there’s a shiver on my shoulder that I can’t get off as I play. In fact, Ridiculous Fishing feels more against the act of fishing than it is for it. Not in the sense that fishing is a bad thing, but that catching life from the sea is scary and possibly life-threatening. Added to this is your desperation to kill all of the fish that come out of the ocean.
I remember a moment when there was a fish that you couldn’t chainsaw through. The moment I found out that I couldn’t upright kill said fish, I jumped and almost shrieked. The fear of not being able to overpower your catch emanated through each run of the game. When you catch a fish, the music starts to play in reverse, giving an impression of terror of your catch to a point where the game gives you a butterfly knife to cut off your line. Each new level adds to the chill with more haunting music and more obstacles that try to block you from getting to the bottom of the sea.
Final thoughts: Ridiculous Fishing is a fun game. The idea where you’re basically shooting everything that comes out of the sea definitely got me laughing. Then, I got to the second level of the game and everything got weird.
It was the same gameplay, same game mechanics, but I felt a chill run down my spine. The game was still ridiculous and funny but it also felt haunted, as if the game was trying to shoo me away while trying to hold me down with a long piece of thick rope, it was one of the most peculiar gaming experiences I have ever had. With the increased firepower and with the insane amounts of fish, I could never stop laughing at the game, but I was nervous.
