Cat Goes Fishing
I have a soft spot in my heart for quiet, zen games, where the point is not high action or immediate decisions, but the quiet calm of rote repetition. They’re soothing, and in the right context, do a lot to help make the world better.
Cat Goes Fishing doesn’t do that. Cat Goes Fishing makes me mad, and I’m going to spend the next several paragraphs explaining exactly why.
fishing
Cat Goes Fishing is a casual simulation game. You play as a cat, and you are fishing. There are a wide variety of fish, and as you catch them, you gain points. These points are then spent on upgrades, allowing you to catch bigger and bigger fish, and go to more and more exciting places.
On the surface, this concept should work well. Fishing is generally considered pretty relaxing, and the concept of using fishing in a simulation game is a pretty well known one. The trouble with Cat Goes Fishing is not in the concept. Rather, it’s in the execution
The problem comes in with the fact that there are goals to aspire to and ways to achieve them. As you catch fish, you accumulate points, which you are then able to trade for new equipment, allowing you to catch a wider variety of fish. However, with a finite number of fish in the pond, the game quickly runs into a problem where the fish needed to buy the upgrades are uncatchable. The game, at this point, stalls.
fishing
One of the critical features of any casual, zen game is that it can’t stall. The point is to be able to do the relaxing thing for as long as the player feels the need to continue. As soon as the game stalls, it reveals the pointlessness of the entire thing. The magic, essentially, gets stripped away, and rather than being relaxing, the game becomes intolerable. With Cat Goes Fishing, there are two mechanics fueling the stalling and the sense of frustration. The limited number of fish in the pool ensures that there will eventually be a point where catching fish becomes unreasonably difficult, if not impossible. The value assigned to the fish, though, ensures that even if a fish is caught, the player doesn’t actually make any progress from it.
fishing
Cat Goes Fishing adds a difficulty mechanic where larger fish will eat smaller fish if the fish is drawn too close to them. While this adds a much needed sense of challenge, when there is a limited number of fish in the pool, there is also a limited number of channels they can pass through to be able to catch them. This means that once a fish is caught, it gets eaten by larger fish, and is worth no points. The pool is not only diminished, but the player makes no progress towards actually being able to clear obstacles.
It’s at this point that Cat Goes Fishing veers hard into unplayable.
f*cking fishing
Cat Goes Fishing’s concept is a sweet one. The idea of a cat and their fishing pole slowly becoming gods of catdom is a nice one. In execution, though, Cat Goes Fishing is a frustrating mess that left me feel like I, rather than the fish, had been catfished, and swallowed the bait, hook, line, and sinker.
Developer: Cat5Games
Genre: Simulation
Year: 2015
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 12 Hours