How to Fish sounds like it should be a relaxing fishing game.
It is not.
My friend and I started out shipwrecked on an island with one simple goal: learn how to fish and somehow make our way home. That plan lasted approximately five minutes before everything completely fell apart.
Instead of peacefully sitting by the water waiting for a bite, we ended up drinking beer, fighting wildlife, buying weapons, gambling away our money, crashing boats, and spending way too much time trying to kill each other. At one point, a crab killed us. Later, I got absolutely body-slammed by a whale. Somewhere in between all of that, I think we actually caught a fish.
The basic progression is surprisingly good underneath all the stupidity. You start with almost nothing, catch or kill fish, sell what you get, and slowly earn enough money for better equipment, weapons, and boat upgrades. As you progress, you can travel to new islands, complete quests, fight bosses, hunt for rare fish variants, and make even more money by pulling off ridiculous trick shots.
The physics are easily one of the funniest parts of the game. Things rarely happen exactly how you expect them to, and that’s what makes it work. A normal fishing trip can turn into complete disaster because someone throws the wrong object, falls off the boat, gets attacked, or decides that shooting their friend is more important than whatever quest you’re supposed to be doing.
Playing solo is still entertaining, but multiplayer is where How to Fish really shines. With friends, every objective becomes optional the second someone gets a bad idea. We would start with an actual plan, get distracted almost immediately, and then realize 30 minutes later that we had accomplished absolutely nothing.
And somehow, that never felt like wasted time.
The game doesn’t take itself seriously, and neither should you. It knows exactly what kind of experience it wants to be: a weird combination of fishing simulator, physics sandbox, co-op adventure, shooter, and pure stupidity.
There are also more reasons to keep progressing than I expected. New islands bring tougher creatures and better equipment, bosses give you something to work toward, and collecting rare fish variants gives competitions something extra to chase. Gambling also exists because apparently catching fish normally wasn’t chaotic enough.
It’s not perfect. The physics can occasionally work against you, items can go flying somewhere they definitely weren’t supposed to go, and you’ll occasionally run into the kind of bugs you’d expect from a game built around intentionally ridiculous physics. Recent patches have addressed things like item velocity, balance, voice chat, and Steam Cloud saves, so the developers are clearly still improving it.
But honestly, some of the rough edges almost add to the experience.
How to Fish is one of those games where the funniest moments aren’t scripted. They’re created by you and your friends being complete idiots.
Our experience basically went like this:
- Got shipwrecked.
- Drank a lot of beer.
- Got murdered by a crab.
- Recreated the Titanic.
- Bought guns.
- Started shooting each other.
- Gambled.
- Got body-slammed by a whale.
- Completely forgot we were supposed to be fishing.
By the end of the night, we had learned almost nothing about fishing.
And I wouldn’t change a thing.
If you want a serious, realistic fishing simulator, this probably isn’t what you’re looking for. But if you want a cheap co-op game where you and your friends can fish, fight bosses, gamble, shoot things, crash boats, and turn every simple objective into a complete disaster, How to Fish is absolutely worth checking out.
9/10 — We came to learn how to fish. We left with guns, gambling problems, and unresolved issues with a whale
