I find a lot to admire about Fishing Vacation, and I think for the most part the stuff that’s cool about it is stuff that can only happen in the indie sphere that spawned it. This is a horror game where the atmosphere is relaxed and the scares are generally pretty gentle; a fishing game where the fishing is aggressively, satisfyingly simple; and a Gameboy throwback game that doesn’t just emulate the FEELING of the 8-bit era but, for the most part, actually does stick to what feels like an 8-bit aesthetic even when it does seem like making portaits and sprites more complex and detailed might enhance the visceral immediacy of the present scare. But Fishing Vacation Deluxe isn’t interested in doing the absolute scariest thing possible, it just wants to be what it is, which is a neat little slow build story with a consistent structure and artistic vision that guides you through as many of its endings as you’d like to see with a lot of skill and very little muss.

The hook is that you’ve been invited to go on a Fishing Vacation by your friend at their uncle’s old cabin. Your friend hasn’t heard from their uncle in a hot minute but everyone has fond memories of fishing up at the pond so you two drive on down there only to find the cabin looking a little run down and nobody there. Bad vibes will not deter you however – there’s fishing to be done! It quickly becomes apparent that your being lured to the cabin is intertwined with a version of the myth of real life Inuit ocean goddess Sedna, and that your friend’s uncle was up to…something. But listen, don’t think about any of that stuff – there’s fishing to be done!!

Humor is core to this game in a way that could have gone wrong really easily (and often does, catastrophically, as I am writing this only days after Neon White’s release lol), but here your friend insisting on sticking to their quirk of spouting honestly good and funny fish puns even as they are cracking upon finding your second set of human remains on the property, or the way you start the game fishing up trout but by the end of it are fishing up more and more outlandish sea life like octopuses and swordfish (which is also clever foreshadowing) punctuate the tension but don’t alleviate it.

If there’s one thing I’m not totally sure how I feel about it’s the use of Sedna as the focal point around which the story of the game turns. I’m of two minds about it. On one hand I think that most of the time when you see mythological figures used in media like this it’s often so that the writers can play with the aesthetics of something iconic within the story they already wanted to tell, and when those ideas are borrowed by usually white writers from marginalized cultures things often get turbo-racist immediately; this practice is alive and well in video games – Until Dawn, a game I really love, springs to mind immediately. The studio that made Fishing Vacation, Teebowah Games, is made up of two guys who as far as I can tell from their twitters and patreon, are both white. I don’t think they do anything as egregious here as, say, the shit in Until Dawn, and at first I was interested in what it seemed like the game was doing. Initially, it does kind of seem like the game is just presenting you with a completely straight telling of a real version of the story of Sedna’s creation myth, and the characterization of Sedna as an entity in the game might even be benign, with the actual Bad Shit going on more a product of maybe a Crazy Guy who has made Sedna the object of his fixations (this it’s own whole thing haha). But at the end of the day you do still have a terrifying corpse like fish monster that does creepy whispering to signal its presence and does genuinely seem to be brainwashing people in a heinous way that is effective in a forty minute horror game but does make me wonder if you couldn’t just have made it an anonymous fish monster. I’m not acting like I’m an authority on an Inuit deity that I didn’t know existed an hour ago, and I’m not writing a researched essay here or anything, and I’m not the person to be making these judgement calls ultimately, but it’s something that I can’t quite shake when I’m reflecting on the game as a general experience, as positive as it is overall.

And it IS positive. Fishing Adventure is a little bit goofy looking, a little bit goofy sounding, and entirely charmingly written, but without being precious about any of that stuff in a way that makes any of it grate. This lack of preciousness extends to the horror, which is paced well, extremely methodical without being too obvious, and like, y’know, creepy, even if it’s not blood pumping. It doesn’t have to be. When I said at the beginning that I think some things are only possible in the indie space this is kind of what I meant – a AAA horror game would not be allowed to be so purposefully gentle in spookiness. You don’t see stuff that is mostly just about cultivating a tense vibe. But there’s room for it! It worked for me, really well! Despite some of my misgivings about the game I am excited for the full version of Teebowah’s next game, which looks like it’ll elaborate on some of the structural ideas here while pushing into some sick other stuff like all three POV perspectives? Indie horror rules it’s just an endless ocean out there. Ina’s feasting.