Steam’s latest lair game (don’t call it friends, you’ll reignite the discourse) is How to Fish, a macabre novelty in which hideous worms head to small, cursed islands, reel in angry sea life, and subdue the creatures with golden sniper rifles, spending the profits on weapons and gadgets. I could be misinterpreting, but I don’t think the idea is sincerely to teach you how to fish.
Perhaps because of occult forces, and perhaps because a famous streamer made a video, the game garnered around 340,000 concurrent players at launch this weekend. As a reminder, the free beta of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 also launched this weekend, attracting around 115,000 competitors. I doubt How to Fish has a budget the size of Call of Duty, so it’s a very flattering ratio. Maybe they have a budget the size of CoD and blew it on an extremely high-fidelity cod that hasn’t been hooked yet – a fully ray-traced fish with 32,000 textures, lurking on the ocean floor like a GPU melting kraken.
People seem to like How to Fish, by the way Steam User Reviewsalthough I suspect some critics just want in on the joke. To me, the game feels like the latest in a long line of broken and unheimlich comic violence games, meant to strut and fret on stage only to be heard no more. But let’s not forget that I’m a disgusting, has-been snob who wouldn’t know about a trend if it jumped out of the water and bit his knees. Please don’t tell the kids I said How to Fish sounded unheimlich – it’s literally been months since my last death threat.
Regardless, developers Dazed Games are even now rushing to shore up their creation, with a series of patches this weekend. If you’ve tried it yourself, here’s a look at the most important updates.
First, the game now supports eight-player lobbies and invite-only private lobbies. There should no longer be fake servers titled “Game Name”, and people in trouble can no longer join and instantly end the game. You can now change the session type in the game, but then you will need to restart. The game also now saves when you press Save, Main Menu, or Exit, in addition to autosaving every minute, so there’s less loss of progress as you crash. There is now the ability to invert the X and Y axes, and the minimum locked FPS has been reduced from 50 to 30.
As for bug fixes, they removed one that allowed people to travel to any island without unlocking them, which is a real boost in Golden Snappers for speedrunners. You will also no longer notice slot skins becoming invisible when playing in 4K.
In terms of game balance, they nerfed the pufferfish and the whale, and “made the intended path to the final island easier to see.” Having not played the game – I spent my weekend outside in healthy sunshine rather than shooting low-poly tuna, even though I absolutely murdered a potato salad – I can only gawk unnecessarily at these details. Was the pufferfish a real asshole before? I can only assume so. These are fish that turn into huge spiky balls, right? I can imagine it being a chore to balance, but then again, I’m not sure How to Fish is particularly interested in graduated difficulty curves.
