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Get Hooked on Cat Goes Fishing

Get Hooked on Cat Goes Fishing

We all need a palette cleanser from huge, epic games from time to time. Lately, mine has been the adorable and surprisingly addictive Cat Goes Fishing . Available on Android and now on Steam, the game is exactly as advertised. You are a cat, and you’re going fishing. What makes it addictive is its simple but effective gameplay formula.

Cat starts off on a pier, with an ocean stocked full of cute happy fish just waiting to be reeled in. Cast the rod, let go when the bait is over Cat’s head, and you’re on your way to hours of fishing fun. Reel in a few fish, and the game provides simple tutorials, gradually adding new features as you go along. Simple quests help guide your gameplay and earn you cash so that you can improve your kit.

Progressing in the game isn’t as simple as casting the rod and reeling fish in willy-nilly. You’ll want to catch a small, cheap fish to start, then toss it back out as bait. Your goal is now to use that medium-sized bait to reel in a medium-sized fish, which requires avoiding small fish who will gleefully cannibalize their former brethren. Life at sea is harsh.

Catch a medium fish, and toss it back as large bait to attempt to catch a big whopper. The largest fish swim deeper and/or farther from shore, so it requires some finesse with the rod to get the large bait down to them. You’ll become skilled at reeling your bait away from unwanted catches and knowing when to use bombs to scare off particularly annoying schools. Alternately, you can save your money for rod upgrades that help you dodge the small fish on your way down to the big ones.

Along with new rods and rod upgrades, you can buy boats to range farther from shore, though they have limited fish storage space. You can even catch hats for your kitty to wear, which do everything from making certain sizes of fish more valuable to giving you two active quests at once. Even better, unlike your real cat, this one won’t claw your face off when you fit it with a baseball cap.

Get Hooked on Cat Goes Fishing

All these small elements add complexity to the game as well as providing small goals to work towards. The farther you get, the more challenging the game becomes, but it always feels like the next step is just a few casts away. It feels satisfying to master your reeling technique and hone in perfectly on that desired fish, but there are always new challenges around the corner.

Weighing in at a whopping eleven megabytes, Cat Goes Fishing should fit and run even on your crappy laptop. Give it a try, and you might find yourself playing far longer than you meant to, thinking you just need one more cast to catch that elusive deep-sea shark.

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