8 hours Ago By [email protected] (Tyler Wilde)
Alone in a chilly, ultra-sterile Santa Monica hotel room last week, the ocean to one side of me and a vast network of Chipotles to the other, I turned to my laptop for a hit of human connection. On Steam's top-sellers list, I found a game that seemed suitable for hotel-grade wi-fi: the $5 Webfishing , which released earlier in October. It's a fishing game, but really it's a cozycore hangout game with little lake and seaside environments, emotes, props, and text chat.
Like every social game, though, the server's wallflowers will never muster more than a "hello" or a question about the controls unless some particularly outgoing player drums up a conversation—and there was no such bon vivant on the server I joined. Things were looking dire after I said "hi" to someone and they immediately quit the game, but everything changed when I overheard one player reveal to another that you can press 'G' to meow. (I should note that we're all cats in this world.
Except for one player who was a dog.) I now had a far better way to communicate than text chat, with all the complex grammar and potential for misunderstanding that comes with: spamming meows. M-m-m-m-meow , I said to the fishercats lining the end of an ocean pier.
They said m-m-m-meow back. Except the dog, who barked. Later I wandered around meowing in the faces of players who were minding their own business—fishing by the lake, listening to tunes on a boombox—and I understand better now why cats and certain puckish children like to do that.
It says: "I exist. No questions, please." (An aside: In games where you drive a car, it's disappointing when you can't honk the horn, but I now think I'd be just as disappointed to control a cat with no meow button, or anything at all with no 'make noise' button.
Everything has its own sort of horn. Let us honk it.) I probably ought to describe the fishing, since the game is called Webfishing, but there's not much to describe: It involves some holding down the mouse button and some rapidly clicking the mouse button, nothing hard.
The first fish I caught was a puny 12cm crayfish from a pond—it was depicted with so few pixels that it barely had a shape—but later I snagged a 108.07cm flounder that was as big as my quite-big head, and saw another player catch a giant octopus. That was a little exciting, and there's probably more depth to the fishing than I know, because the truth is that I lost interest in fishing the moment I noticed another player bouncing on a mushroom.
And then, at the apex of my fifth or sixth mushroom bounce, I spotted a pair of cats rounding a corner and decided to tail them—no meows, this was clandestine. They led me to a beach shop which sold typical beach attire like gold monocles and big top hats, and to my genuine surprise, scratch-off lotto tickets. I instantly sold all the fish I'd caught and bought $100 worth of Fishillionaire scratchers.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Each time I scratched off a losing ticket my cat frowned. I frowned too.
But then I won! $100! A break-even gambling session is a great way to feel good by first causing yourself to feel bad, and leaves you exactly where you need to be to do it again, so I went back to the shop intending to buy another $100 of scratchers. But it was the bouncy mushroom all over again when I spotted a $100 metal detector and decided instantly that I should pivot to treasure hunting. After chasing beeps for several minutes, though, all I found were a junk ring and an old coin.
I sold my crappy treasures and, possibly giving up on metal detecting sooner than I should have, spent all my earnings on scratchers like I'd originally planned. Fishillionaire hadn't let me down yet, after all! No winners, just frowns. My pockets now empty except for a handful of free worms, I moped back to the pier, where dandily-dressed cats were still reeling in big fish, quiet and content.
How had I gotten so mixed up so fast, bouncing on mushrooms and gambling all my money away? I guess we can't escape life's trials even in Webfishing, but at least it comes with friends: I hit the meow key and everyone meowed back (except the dog, who barked). My existence affirmed, I cast my line into the ocean..
