How to Fish review: behind the armed-fish joke is a genuinely good co-op game

How to Fish begins like the kind of game somebody buys because a friend posted a ridiculous clip in Discord.

A drunken boat trip ends on an island. The group needs to fish its way home. The title is technically accurate.

Then the catch reaches dry land, and the game's real idea appears: fishing does not end when the fish leaves the water.

Catching something is only half the loop

Fish can escape, flop around or become targets for equipment that has very little to do with conventional angling. Selling catches funds better rods, but also knives, guns and increasingly excessive solutions.

The available reviews are unusually consistent about this. PUG Empire, Playcritik, Gaming.net and SteamGamer all identify escalation rather than fishing simulation as the core appeal.

Trick shots are the clever bridge between comedy and progression. Ridiculous kills can produce better rewards, turning unnecessary difficulty into an economic strategy.

[image:how_to_fish_s1_body]

The joke has enough structure to keep moving

Dazed Games could have stopped at a one-hour physics sandbox.

Instead, quests lead toward bosses, better equipment and new islands. Each stage introduces increasingly dangerous creatures while preserving the same simple loop of catch, kill, sell and upgrade.

PC Gamer's post-launch boss guides show how quickly conventional fishing gives way to combat preparation. The Spider Crab rewards a melee weapon and careful movement; later bosses demand increasingly specific solutions.

Eight players fundamentally changes the amount of nonsense available

Steam's store description still presents How to Fish as a one-to-four-player game, but Dazed Games expanded official lobby support to eight in Patch 1.0.4.

That update also nerfed the Pufferfish and Whale and addressed several join-related issues.

The larger lobby fits the game unusually well. How to Fish is designed around extremely simple tasks becoming complicated because several people interact with the same physics system.

GameBrief's review identifies the opposite problem in single-player. Without other people producing stories around the mechanics, boss balance becomes harsher and repetition becomes visible much sooner.

Its low price does not erase the short length; it contextualizes it

The base Steam price is $7.99, with a $4.95 launch discount during its first week.

PUG Empire scored it 7.82, Playcritik 8.0 and GameBrief 7.6. Their differences are smaller than their shared conclusion: How to Fish is not deep, but its size and price make that limitation easier to accept.

The recommendation depends heavily on whether a player has a group.

Launch-week patches reveal how rough the first build could be

Black screens, lobby issues and complaints about lost progress appeared around release.

Dazed Games responded with a remarkably fast patch cadence. By August 27, Patch 1.0.10 was already saving up to 64 dropped ground items between sessions and fixing additional progression problems.

Rapid repair does not make those launch problems disappear from a review. It does make the current build a moving target compared with the version critics played on August 20 or 21.

It is a great game night, not necessarily a new lifestyle

How to Fish does not need a hundred-hour endgame to justify itself.

Its achievement is smaller and more specific. It creates a readable task, hands several people unstable physics and enough weapons to make the obvious solution unlikely, then lets the group generate the story.

Solo, that machinery looks thin.

With friends, catching the fish is usually the least memorable part.