Zen and the Art of Virtual Fishing

I decided earlier this year that I was going to go back and actually finish Red Dead Redemption 2, a game I have always appreciated more than I really liked. Wonderful writing, gorgeous graphics, incredible depth and breadth, and really unsatisfying gameplay. I got about halfway through the story when it came out, and then drifted far enough away that I knew I would need to restart it completely, which kept me away for another 5+ years. Meanwhile every time I would see snippets of other people playing the game, I'd wonder why I was so hesitant to finish, and then almost instantly remember the many times I tried to greet strangers on my horse only to inadvertently shoot them, leading to a long chase, immense bounty, and more frustration. So I kept putting off a replay until now, when I desperately needed a distraction from the stress of moving. We handed over the keys to our last apartment on Wednesday, and later that night I found myself concluding the main section of RDR2 and starting the epilogue.

Red Dead is notorious for its intense commitment to graphical fidelity, perhaps best demonstrated by its gruesome hunting/skinning mechanics, by which you stalk, shoot, kill, and dress one of the many photorealistic animals that inhabit the game before slinging the carcass or detached hide over the back of your horse and riding off. I'm not crazy about the hunting in the game, not out of any kind of moral hesitancy or discomfort, but because it's very difficult to get an animal with a good enough pelt to craft the unique items I want, and the experience of watching the light go out of a simulated animal's eyes only to find out that its coat is garbage-tier bullshit that I'll leave littering the floor of the forest primeval wears thin after the 200th time it happens.

There's a long history of hunting/subsistence mechanics in video games, dating back at least to Oregon Trail, and probably further, and I am usually lukewarm-to-cool on them. There's also multiple series devoted to recreating the experience of the modern hunter, with state-of-the-art scopes and wooded glades based on 4k scans of real places in the real world, but because I have zero interest in actual hunting, simulations thereof hold no attraction for me.

There's a quote from famous video game-hater Roger Ebert about film criticism that flatly states that "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it." It's a great axiom if you watch a lot of movies, because you'll miss some real gems if you refuse to watch something just because it's in a genre you don't usually like. You will, of course, still see a bunch of bad movies, but it's worth it—to me at least—to find those surprises, even if the ratio ends up being something like 1 masterpiece for every 25 pieces of shit.

Of course, when it comes to games, I don't feel the urge to drop $70 every time there's a new iteration of Cabela's Ten Point Buck Decimator 6000 just to see if there's some hidden artistic merit. I have never hunted or felt the urge to hunt in real life, and the thought of dispatching a fellow mammal with a rifle runs counter to my conception of the tranquility of nature. That said, I have been fishing, and while I eschew the flesh of aquatic animals IRL, I appreciate the vibes of fishing, and can find some enjoyment in recreating it via controller and console, which is fortunate, because it turns out a lot of games have fishing mechanics in them.

It helps that the controller bears more resemblance to a rod and reel than a gun, especially in the case of the first game I remember really hooking me with its fishing minigame, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In one corner of the map was a small lake with a hut set up outside, and a clerk reeling off the rules and rewards one could achieve by catching a big enough fish. To catch a real whopper, you'd have to go to a particular spot to find a sinking lure, attach it, and pull in a record-setting fish to reap a pile of Rupees. I spent hours letting the kingdom of Hyrule suffer under the tyranny of Ganondorf while I sought larger and larger fish to show off.

Fishing lends itself to to simulation in video games because it creates a discrete gameplay loop that is relatively easy to program and integrate into a larger system. One of the attractions of games like Red Dead and other sandbox-y open worlds is that if you get sick or frustrated with the mainline quest you're on, you can blow countless hours playing poker, or dominoes, or fishing up a storm instead of following the story's path. There are also games where fishing is the primary action you perform, and the other mechanics are there to support or supplement that one. This was the case with one of my favorite games of the past few years, Dredge.

Dredge drops you into an eerie archipelago where you soon find yourself sailing out to sea in a tiny boat to pull up increasingly upsetting monstrous fish to sell, which provide you with upgrades to your boat, gear, and sanity meter, so that you can catch increasingly upsetting...well, you get the idea. The focus on making the fishing mechanic feel great kept me up multiple nights grinding for more rare and better equipment to uncover every one of its secrets, and I finally had to force myself to finish the story (which was only so-so) and move on, although I still think about it a lot.

Recently I had seen some trailers for Cast n Chill, a "cozy" fishing sim with a stunning art style reminiscent of 8 and 16 bit games, which I picked up for my Switch 2 when it went on sale last week. There's no monsters or deeper narrative, as far as I know, just slightly better rods, reels, and watercraft available as I turn in bigger and fancier fish. I bought the "deluxe" edition, which includes a semi-customizable animal companion to sit in the bow of the boat and throw off a little pixelated heart whenever I hit the dedicated pet button. I started playing yesterday and have racked up a slightly embarrassing hour count since. In my defense, I have been multitasking by keeping the volume low and listening to audiobooks or records as I both cast and chill.