Playing its mystery-drenched demo suggests I'll like everything about About Fishing, except the fishing

I spent this morning in the new demo of angler-detective mystery About Fishing – an updated and expanded sampler from the one that Oisin tried last year – and as a piece of playable marketing, it’s done the job. I am intrigued by its tale of mermaids and missing persons; I am absorbed in its creepy rural backdrop of dead streets and churches with prison cells in the basement; I am impressed by how it handles its cold, drizzly weirdness without ever going hey-hey wacky. Even when it introduces a thieving goose.

Basically, this place is horrible, and I want to spend more time in it. Despite the fact, and I’m aware that this might be an issue, that I wish I didn’t have to do so much goddamn fishing.

Not unlike how Arctic Eggs, developers The Water Museum’s previous work, demanded careful mouse waggles to flip frying panfuls of burning breakfast, About Fishing has you wrestling with your peripherals to keep panicking catches on the hook. It’s obviously a move to add some interesting friction to what is a notoriously dull hobby, as is the occasional need to trick-shot your hook through obstacles to tempt the hiding fishies below.

Both actions, however, have an unpleasantly imprecise wibbliness to them. Manoeuvring the hook mid-cast feels like trying to sign your name on a passing wasp, and one you get a nibble, dragging back the thrashing fish relies on good fortune as much as competent mouse-wrestling. They seem magnetically attracted to underwater hindrances – one needlefish I snagged in the tutorial managed to wrap the line around a jetty pillar five times over – and the game’s camera is prone to bumping into scenery as well, making it even less clear whether mouse movements are having a tangible effect.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack

Luckily, About Fishing makes another, much more enjoyable use of its tackle. Successfully bagged fish can be sent back out, line re-attached, as directly controllable scouts, allowing for subaquatic exploration and puzzle-solving. With the latter, getting the line caught stops being a random frustration and starts being an applicable skill: one section requires orbiting a sunken statue head to wrap it in makeshift rope, before a pull on the reel clears the obstruction and allows passage into the conveniently fish-sized hole beneath.

I’m still not keen on how this offbeat troubleshooting first requires the actual fishing part, but again, there’s enough going on in About Fishing that I’m willing to endure its namesake activity. Not many games have what it takes to show a goose eating curly fries and make it look genuinely disturbing.