Fishing, both in life and in video games, has long been synonymous with leisure. Sitting by a body of water, casting a line, and relaxing while waiting for a bite is a tranquil luxury shared equally by grizzled anglers with full tackle boxes and role-playing game fans—a moment of peace amid the turmoil of trying to save one world or merely survive in the real one. Everything from Fallout to Fire Emblem offers the opportunity to fish as a side activity, one meant, above all, to let the player chill out. And then there’s, Sinker Sound, which throws that mentality out the window, causes nothing but stress, and makes fishing feel as complicated as piloting a Gundam.
Cast into early access on March 14, Sinker Sound does not relegate fishing to a side activity. It is the main event, and in an especially arcane form: as a plethora of systems meant to overwhelm and stress you out with the sheer amount of information that needs to be tracked. Much like the constant overflow of battle stats and logistics that flood the displays of mech cockpits in anime, the fishing screen for Sinker Sound bombards the player. At its most basic, this takes rhythm game mechanics and uses it as the interface for catching fish. That begins with a unique song for each fish that sets the tempo for each encounter. To reel one in, players must click and hold on the beat; the longer you hold the more powerful the reel is, but if you hold too long you’ll ruin the catch. It’s a classic tension mechanic in more ways than one: you’ll start to feel real tense while making sure your fishing line doesn’t get too tense and snap. This can be mitigated by doing long or short reels to balance that tension, but all of it must still be done on a beat.
And there’s more, of course. Taking another system from rhythm games, a beat pulse (a line of beats that swirl around the screen towards the center UI) must be effectively “caught” by pointing the rod in the proper direction as they reach the center of the screen. This means that while attempting to reel to the beat and not draw the line too taut the player must also move the mouse around constantly. This requires awareness of tempo as well as spatial awareness for how the beat pulses move. On screen this all combines into an overwhelming cacophony of visual and sonic information. It necessitates the union of hand, eye, and even ear coordination that mech pilots have to ace before taking over their own giant robot.
What truly makes Sinker Sound‘s mechanics so adrenaline pumping, however, is the fact that it absolutely has to become second nature if you want to succeed. Even the easiest fish are no small challenge, and the difficulty only gets greater and the beats faster every time out. To be truly good at Sinker Sound you must, like a mech pilot in the heat of battle, enter a flow state. Reeling to the beat, keeping tension, and hitting beat pulses can’t be done with active thought at every moment. Muscle memory must kick in and hands must move on instinct in response to changing directions and fluctuating rhythms. Fishing is a dance (or more dangerously, a duel) set to the music of each fish’s unique song.
To this effect, all the average fish that can be caught in Sinker Sound‘s open areas are in constant training. Like a pilot doing practice fights in preparation for the real thing, the (literal) little fish of the world are meant to beat into the player the fundamentals of the game. The trick is that when the player finally does attempt to take on one of what are effectively Sinker Sound‘s boss fish, the systems you know are flipped on their head.
When attempting boss fish such as the Great Cat Fish or the Metal Shark, new mechanics will be thrown in. One example are negative beat pulses that must be avoided with your rod at the risk of getting your reel interrupted. To the point of working on instinct, the Metal Shark includes a section that requires the player to repeat a sequence of rod placements in order, to the beat, without guidance. Much like in the heat of battle, these boss encounters randomly can take away visual information you have relied on until now as a means of injecting difficulty. Failure is almost assured if you aren’t able to fish to the standards of Sinker Sound—just like piloting any complex machinery, particularly building-sized robots. And boss fish can have up to nine phases, so the attrition of these grueling encounters is an extra added factor to contend with. Catching these monsters is nothing short of a Gundam-sized battle.
That sentiment, of every aspect of Sinker Sound being its own battle, is at the core of why this game makes you feel like you’re in a mech’s cockpit instead of a small prop boat idling on a lazy lake. Unlike the serenity fishing almost always brings in games, stress and tension (both as a mechanic and the condition you’ll find yourself in) are the defining factors of every encounter in Sinker Sound. It may be about nothing more than catching a fish, but it sure feels like getting in a robot and fighting for your life.