Fishing Vacation Review Nintendo Switch 8/10 "Some More Bite-sized horror has reeled me in!" 🎣🪱 @TeebowahGames #IndieGames #GameDev

After recently covering a couple of Puppet Combo games and assorted other budget horror titles, my horror trousers were very much still firmly attached to my legs. As I was pottering around through our list of games for coverage, Fishing Vacation stood out – an atmospheric horror with Game Boy visuals? Count me in.

A game that can be completed in under an hour – although it has multiple endings – Fishing Vacation begins with two old friends who haven’t seen each other for years driving up to a rural cabin on a fishing trip. When they arrive, the uncle that owns the cabin is nowhere to be found and everything is in disarray...oh, and the fridge is full of rotting fish-heads…

What follows are three days spent digging up worms and then fishing. Each morning you get to explore the cabin, reading up on fishy lore, seeing if anything has changed overnight, and trying to find the three keys that unlock the mysterious cellar door.

The two mini-games are simple and fun enough so that they don’t outstay their welcome. When you go worming, it’s out of the cabin and off a screen to the left to dig up as many worms as you can in thirty seconds, before traipsing a couple of screens to the right for the hardcore fishing action.

The game then cuts from the typical Game Boy JRPG overhead shot to a POV whereby you look for ripples and shadows under the water, before casting a line using a power bar, and then following the wonderfully frantic on-screen prompts to reel in your catch. 

The atmosphere overall really works with the tone of the game, the cartoonish characters and blippy music works eerily well against the growing sense of ‘all is not well’ that permeates the events that unfold. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a jump-scare-filled terror-thon, but a casual slice-of-life game that really held my interest to completion.

The Game Boy aesthetic is a tasty setting for horror, as the natural limitations force the game to be accessible and simple, so the atmosphere has to come through in clever writing and design – as is the case here.

SUMMARY

With the ability to choose your own colour palette and background, Fishing Vacation is a tightly-written little horror tale that is perfectly pitched and of a perfect length.

Currently on sale for under £2 on the Nintendo Store, if you like retro horror, this is a very cool title that I thoroughly enjoyed my time with, and fully intend to complete again soon to see those other endings.

Right...I’m off to find that other shoe in the lake….