We check out the open beta of About Fishing, a narrative indie that starts as a gentle afternoon of fishing and curly fries with grandpa before sliding into a surreal murder mystery and eerie underwater horror.
"About Fishing" arrives wearing all the hallmarks of a cozy fishing game. The Water Museum, the small team behind Arctic Eggs, sets its open beta on a rainy afternoon by the lake, your world reduced to ripples on the water, the patient bob of a float, and a gruff old man who is probably your grandpa. You cast your line, wait for a tug, then shuffle back to the pier for a paper tray of curly fries while he complains about his tacklebox. At first it feels like the whole game might just be this small: quiet time with an abrasive relative, a slim loop of catching fish and handing them over in return for more grumbled instructions.
That low-key opening is intentional. About Fishing is built on the specific rhythm of fishing games that ask you to sit still instead of chasing constant rewards. Casting is simple, reminiscent of Animal Crossing, but the process of bringing a fish in has just enough friction to make it tactile. Once something bites, the camera plunges underwater to follow your hook. You guide the struggling fish toward shore using the mouse or keyboard, feeling out the invisible tension between line and catch. It plays like a dedicated fishing sim rather than a throwaway minigame and the repetition of cast, wait, reel creates a gentle, almost meditative tempo that matches the drizzle and the hiss of oil from grandpa’s fries.
The first cracks in that calm are emotional rather than supernatural. Grandpa is not the cardigan-and-wisdom archetype that cozy games usually lean on. He is curt, demanding you fill his tacklebox without much explanation, treating you more like unpaid labor than favored grandchild. The setting is still small and safe on the surface, but there is a dissonance in his barbed comments and the way he pushes you back out onto the dock in worsening weather. That slight discomfort is what About Fishing builds on once it starts revealing the murder mystery under its placid lake.
The pivot arrives through the same fishing mechanics that defined the opening. After a while, grandpa teaches you a new trick that feels subtly wrong even before the game shows you why. He has you take one of your freshly caught fish, skewer it back onto the line and puppeteer its corpse through the water. Suddenly that serene underwater camera shot becomes alien, your bait a limp body that you steer deeper and deeper into the dark. There is no jump scare, just the mounting realization that you are using a dead thing as a lure for something worse.
Following that grisly lesson leads you into a hole at the bottom of the lake. Here the game’s tone is no longer just uneasy, it is bluntly horrific. In the murk you find a human body wrapped in plastic, posed in a way that evokes the iconic image of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Beside it floats a mermaid, an image that should be fantastical and inviting but instead reads as intrusively wrong, like a myth that has seeped into a crime scene. The moment snaps the game out of its cozy shell and into full mystery mode without throwing away any of the systems you have been learning.
That consistency is a big part of why About Fishing is so effective as cozy-turned-spooky horror. The same routine of casting, waiting and reeling that felt safe now carries dread. Dropping a line is no longer just a way to pass the time with grandpa, it is how you descend back toward the body you are not supposed to know about and the creature that should not be there. The game relies less on explicit gore and more on the tension between what you expect from a lakeside sim and what it keeps putting at the end of your hook.
Even in this early open beta slice, you can see the edges of a larger structure forming. The developers pitch About Fishing as somewhere between Sega Bass Fishing and Shenmue, with a focus on deliberate fishing systems and a surrounding story about a town, its people and what hides beneath both. The opening chapter stops just as that wider world begins to come into view, but the promise is clear. Grandpa’s fixation on the tacklebox and that plastic-wrapped body feel like the first threads of a broader mystery that will pull you away from the dock and into conversations with locals who have their own reasons to look away from the lake.
That combination of small-scale routine and creeping unease places About Fishing firmly in the growing cozy-meets-horror niche of narrative indie games. It understands what makes “cozy” work, from the simple sensory pleasures of rain on water and hot food in cold weather to the reassuring repetition of a familiar task. Then it quietly corrupts those comforts. The safe adult figure is prickly and secretive. The soothing minigame is the tool that pushes you into contact with the uncanny. The bright, inviting pier is the launch point for an investigation into death and myth.
For players who enjoy games that blur comfort and discomfort, About Fishing’s beta suggests something special. It is not content to simply bolt a horror twist onto a tranquil sim. Instead it lets the horror emerge out of the cozy structure itself, so that every return trip to the dock, every shared snack with grandpa, carries new questions about what you are really helping him do. If the final game can extend that carefully paced shift from gentle to ghastly across a full town and a full mystery, it could be one of the standout narrative indies in this increasingly fascinating hybrid genre.