(Wondering if your favourite game has a fishing minigame? Have questions on what counts as a fishing minigame? Asks are open and can now be done anonymously!)
"8-10 hours" baby I can stretch this eldritch fishing game out forever.
I'm shooting for day 365. I'm hitting that one year anniversary. maybe the shady mayor will throw me a little party. I worked in a call center the Horrors don't scare me
my fav of the regional monsters in dredge! (alternative title is POV you are me looking for sailfish aberrations using bait and you didn't notice how late it has gotten until you hear The Noise)
You know what I’ve gotten obsessed with and inspired by? Dredge.
You know what is also fun? Merfolk. What’s even better? Lovecraftian corrupted merfolk. Especially if say, one goes with the Lazarus Waters being a form of ectoplasm. So, in this? Lazarus waters are like lakes, while Amity Park, thanks to the Portal, and the barriers? It is an entire sea.
There are islands, small areas that were once the tips of buildings that have gathered more landmass around them. There are mangroves, trees not like anything on earth or anywhere else stretching up in canopies dark enough to block out the sun, yet lit by the green waters.
It goes deep. Mariana Trench deep, despite it being impossible. The GIW have explored for caves or tunnels, they’ve tried to find some sort of explanation, but there isn’t one.
Now all that ecto? That has an effect on people. They mutate, they change, they adapt. Anywhere else would have been a slow death- something the GIW might have even been counting on. But Amity Park? It was founded by witches, it was the hotspot for the supernatural, even before the Fentonwork Portal.
They’ve been dealing with this sort of energy in microdoses from the moment they first began to live in the city in any generation.
But they begin to adapt. Shift into something… other. Some stay contaminated, clinging to human forms as they form homes on the tiny islands, fishing and farming what they can. Others become Liminal, almost seeming to meld with fish, some similar to ones of the Living and others something just to the left. Similar yes, but not quite… right. And then there are those that have truly melded with the energy of the dead, forms torn asunder by it, ripped apart and made anew by it.
The first sign back when the barrier was activated, when they could no longer leave and were trapped were the fish in the lake. And now they are the same, with gazes of something Else, with gnashing teeth and a hunger gnawing at where hearts once were.
But they aren’t monsters. They’re still themselves. Just a little… Other now.
So it’s like a huge thing in Dredge that sometimes you pull up these lovecraftian type of mutant fish… like, they’re rarer and more valuable, albeit fucked up variants of the normal ones you catch. Kind of like shiny Pokémon if the shinies had many eyes where they shouldn’t or clumps of parasitic, Gigeresque cysts covering their malformed bodies.
Anyway the least disturbing and MOST funny one to me that I’ve encountered so far has to be this aberrant version of blackmouth salmon
Like, I’m sorry, devs?… that’s not some unholy divergence from the course of the natural order that’s just a normal ass chinook in the spawning season. No joke, they just casually rot alive exactly like that every single generation of fish.
Heads up: under this cut gets gross
Photos of real salmon during the spawn season that turn my stomach in a way this video game can only aspire to
In case you ever wondered, this is also the reason people don’t eat post-spawn adults.
Remember kids, as much as any of us try, it’s very hard to top the worldbuilding of the greatest horror author of all- Mother Nature.