Scale the Depths

fih

A pretty fun little fishing game, with interesting preparation mechanics, that falls flat later in the game after a strong start. Still worth playing on sail. +++ The core gameplay is really fun. You catch fish, find items and secrets, carefully prepare the fish, and figure out what type of fish each customer wants. Then you upgrade and repeat. Each level has separate progress. ++ There's a huge amount of literary and graphical content here. Lore to read, fish and customer biographies, item descriptions, etc. Each treasure can be inspected and played with. ++ Good graphics, nice to look at. + Works well with controller for the most part. Navigating menus is awkward. +/- Unlocking all cosmetics and customers and fish and 100%ing the game takes lot of annoying grinding. The kind of grinding where you cannot turn your brain off. Not a problem for me personally, but something to be aware of if you're a completionist. +/- Some customers and fish [spoiler]are actual monsters and[/spoiler] may be scary for young children. - The game is reasonably long. If you don't go for 100%, it might be disappointingly short, at only 4 levels to explore. It took me 8 hours, going for 100% at first, then giving up once I realised how annoying that would become, and going for… mostly completeness. Basically my own personal definition of "complete". The game hints at a secret 5th level, but this was bait at time of review, pun intended. Maybe future content or DLC? - Frame drops when preparing the fish, makes descaling the fish hard because it skips scales when the frame drops. Can be partially fixed by reducing resolution in full screen mode. Not much difference in a pixel art game anyway. - Most text is very small and hard to read, and often sways with the tide, with no option to increase font size. I was unable to read most text due to visual disability, but still able to progress by guessing the words. -- The "favourite fish" mechanic doesn't matter too much. It's far more efficient to just catch a boat load of high-value 900 point fish, than fuss over bonus multipliers on 50 value fish. You also cannot store many fish, so it's not like you can keep a shipping container of different fish types ready to play the memory minigame. The choice is either short-order fishing for a small bonus, or casting a wider net. --- The game never really mixes up it's mechanics at all. It's basically the same at minute 1 as hour 8.