How About Fishing lures you in with curly fries and quiet lakes before tugging you toward a murder‑mystery horror, and why this “spooky fishing” beta fits perfectly into today’s cozy‑meets‑creepy trend.
About Fishing does not open with a monster, a blood‑slick shoreline, or some cursed hook. It opens with curly fries.
You are a kid spending a day with her grandpa. There is gentle small talk about life, about fishing, about nothing in particular. The lake is still. The pace is slow in that deliberate way cozy games lean on, where pressing a button is less important than settling into the scene. This is the slice of About Fishing that its Steam blurb leans into, a fishing mystery that “blends the calm, meditative rhythm of fishing with the quiet tension of discovery.” In the open beta, that calm comes first.
Then the unease starts to seep in.
A day with grandpa that starts soft
The open beta, currently available as a free playtest on Steam, is framed as a prologue. Alpha Beta Gamer describes it as the origin story of the main character, back when she was a young girl learning to fish from grandpa. Practically speaking, it is a tutorial. You learn casting, tension, how different fish pull on the line, and how to read the surface of the water.
But the tutorial is dressed in narrative. Rock Paper Shotgun’s preview lingers on the mundanity of it all: sitting at a diner with grandpa, sharing food, talking about the lake. This is where About Fishing initially feels more like a life sim than a thriller. The script is low key. The character portraits are oddly photographic in a way that amplifies the sense of sitting across from a real old man, listening to stories that trail off into memory.
Out on the water the same rhythm continues. Casting is not an arcade twitch test so much as a loop of observation and timing. Fish species behave differently, and learning their patterns is as much about watching as it is about reeling. This is the game laying the groundwork for a full release that, according to its Steam page, will revolve around trading your catch, upgrading gear, and slowly unlocking deeper and more dangerous fishing spots.
For the length of the beta though, it is enough that the water feels peaceful, the dock feels solid, and grandpa is nearby.
When the hook catches something else
The turn in About Fishing does not come from a jump scare. It comes from the catches getting stranger.
The beta gradually introduces the idea that the lake holds more than the expected assortment of trout and perch. Lines snag on things that are not fish. Bits of story surface in item descriptions and strange finds. Rock Paper Shotgun talks about the moment when what you pull from the water stops being relaxing and starts being deeply wrong, the quiet realization that this sweet afternoon with grandpa is also the first tug on a much darker mystery.
The horror here is quiet rather than loud. About Fishing leans on atmosphere, timing, and implication. The retro 3D visuals are softened by pixelation, yet the character faces are mapped with realistic textures that border on uncanny. It is like watching an old home video that occasionally glitches in ways you cannot quite explain. Background details in the environment and dialogue seeds hint at a town history and at incidents that people almost talk about but then swallow.
This gently escalating strangeness is what gives the open beta its narrative punch. You start in a familiar loop, you feel safe in that loop, and then the loop is used against you. The same cast‑wait‑reel rhythm that was meditative becomes tense because now you know you might pull up something you do not want to see.
Fishing as investigation
Even in this limited slice, About Fishing is already positioning its core mechanic as more than a way to pass time. Fishing is investigation. Every cast is a question: what exactly is down there, and what does it want to tell you?
The Steam page for the full game talks about how each fish has distinct patterns and behaviors, and how the wider campaign will see you trading catches, upgrading your tackle, and exploring new biomes as days pass, weather shifts, and the town follows its own routines. The open beta trims that structure down to a single, memorable day, but you can feel how that structure will scale.
If every new depth introduces rarer creatures and stranger artifacts, then progression is as much about sinking into the mystery as it is about filling a compendium. The calm repetition of casting and reeling becomes the scaffolding for a slow‑burn horror story. Players do not stop to trigger a cutscene; they discover story threads organically, one catch at a time.
It is a smart approach for a fishing game. Fishing is inherently about patience and uncertainty, waiting to see what finally bites. About Fishing takes that familiar tension and gently tilts it into dread.
Cozy on the surface, rotten underneath
In that sense About Fishing is very much part of a broader trend in indie games that twist cozy mechanics into something more disquieting. Titles like Dredge, with its corrupted catches and fog‑choked seas, and Slay the Princess, which dresses a campfire story in visual novel clothing, have shown there is an appetite for games that feel familiar until they do not.
About Fishing seems less openly hostile than some of its peers. Its lakes are not immediately menacing, and its grandpa is not a winking parody of the kindly mentor archetype. The horror arrives later, in how the game reframes what you thought was a simple fishing trip. That restraint might be its biggest strength. By starting so convincingly cozy, it makes every subsequent twist feel like a violation of a space you had already decided was safe.
This sits neatly alongside the wider “cozy‑meets‑creepy” movement in modern game design. Developers are taking genres traditionally coded as gentle pastoral escapes — farming, cooking, dating, and now fishing — and using their loops to smuggle in heavier themes. It is not just about jump scares. It is about exploring grief, isolation, generational secrets, or violence beneath the surface of ordinary life.
About Fishing’s prologue hints at exactly that kind of emotional undercurrent. The intergenerational dynamic between the kid and her grandpa, the half‑finished anecdotes, the sense that the lake has been in the family story for a long time, all suggest that the mystery is as personal as it is supernatural.
Why the open beta is worth a cast
As a beta, this is not a sprawling sandbox. You are getting a vertical slice focused on that first day, a proof of concept for how fishing, story, and tone braid together. There are only so many fish to catch and only so many ways the lake can surprise you in this build.
What makes it compelling anyway is how intentionally it treats those limited tools. The writing trusts silence. The visuals walk the line between nostalgic and unsettling. The loops of casting and waiting are tangible enough that when the game starts to misbehave, you feel it.
For anyone intrigued by the idea of “spooky fishing” or looking for something that lives in the gap between a chill sim and a psychological horror, the About Fishing open beta is worth installing while it is available. It will teach you how to cast a line. Then, once you are comfortable, it will quietly start asking what else might be hooked on the end of it.