STU THE FISHERMAN

A nice relaxing fishing game. Mechanics are simple; collect fish, aim for the high-value fish. However, since the low-value fish tend to swim towards your hook and the high-value fish swim away or protect themselves, this can require some careful manoeuvring to do well. Then comes the roguelike elements: the trinket system seems very inspired from Balatro's jokers, and how money is calculated follows suit. This isn't a bad thing, Balatro is a good game and Stu borrows arguably its best part, it just means that if you're familiar with that game, the winning strategies in Stu the Fisherman will seem very familiar. My only gripes are minor, and seem largely to do with the early-access nature of the game, and the fact I'm fairly early on in progression. There's some stock art being used as placeholders for some of the trinkets, viable strategies are quite limited, and the story mode seems pretty easy. Both of these things will likely be fixed during development as more content is added, and placeholder sprites are swapped out for purpose-made art. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project goes in development, what's here so far seems like a good foundation. It's already a fun game with nice art, all it needs is some polish.

Loving it so far! I've never pined to go deeper into the ocean like this before! Normally I hate the idea, but this game just had me continuing to dive even deeper and I've enjoyed every bit. I'm super casual so am hoping for a mid-week save option but the vibes are immaculate. No shade to webfishing, its wonderful, but this is more up my alley.

really fun, chill roguelite about fishing. the dings after each cast are so satisfying!

It's a couple hours of fun

It's fun for a little bit and not very expensive, but there isn't a lot of depth to it and there are better fishing games out there. I was able to max everything out by week 2 except for the last fishing area which I just had to skip days to unlock and maxed out in a day. It also looks like a lot of the things on the roadmap to be implemented before the 1.0 release weren't. I played a demo a year or so ago and it doesn't seem like much has changed since then. It's a cute game, but I wouldn't recommend it.