Ridiculous Fishing feels like shoving a fistful of Pringles into your mouth. Like absent mindedly tugging at the lever of a one-armed bandit. Ridiculous Fishing is a compulsive behaviour and it makes me feel bad about myself as a human being. There is no joy in it. No monetary or physical gain, just a series of arbitrary objectives built upon a foundation of other equally arbitrary objectives. Ridiculous Fishing is a magnificently constructed mirage, a house of cards. It’s a white whale. A modern day Moby Dick. There is nothing concrete here, no genuine fun to be found, but still I trudge. I sink my line into the watery abyss and play with dead eyes throbbing lifelessly in hollow sockets.
This is the grand achievement of Ridiculous Fishing. If gaming is a series of meaningless obstacles made meaningful, then Ridiculous Fishing is gaming’s masterpiece.
How do I begin to explain…
The concept of Ridiculous Fishing is simple — you drop a lure into the ocean, you guide said lure deep into the ocean using motion control. You try and avoid the fish on the way down then, conversely, attempt to collect all of the fish on the way up.
It’s mind-numbingly dull. It’s not even compelling on a second-to-second basis like, say, Doodle Jump or Tiny Wings. There’s no tactile feedback to speak of, it’s not a game you could realistically describe as ‘enjoyable’. Ridiculous Fishing is simply a game about goals and attempting to reach those goals.
Ridiculous Fishing dangles many carrots in front of the player, goals that echo harmoniously. The carrots head in the precise same direction, but somehow remain distinct from one another. Some goals remains close while others dangle in the distance. When you reach one arbitrary point, it is immediately replaced by another, achingly close in reach. There is an incredible bait and switch and the end result is a video game that is terrifying difficult to stop playing.
The first carrot is the lure of new gear. In Ridiculous Fishing you begin with a fishing rod and a gun, but catching fish provides you with in-game cash, which allows you to upgrade. Pretty soon you’ll be dangling a chainsaw lure into the ocean and shooting the fish with an Uzi. And that’s just the beginning.
But these upgrades are tied to other goals. They help you to plunge deeper into the depths of the ocean. This allows you to catch new different fish and attract money faster, but this goal is tied to the second dangling carrot. If you catch enough new types of fish the game allows you to head to a brand new fishing area, where you can catch different fish and get more money to upgrade your gear all over again which then allows you to go deeper into this new area and then find new fish which then allows you to head to a new new area.
And round and round we go, lost in a labyrinth of goals we actually don’t care about, intricately tied in a series of deftly tied knots, churning towards a victory we don’t really value or understand. We just keep on trucking, plunging our lure into the depths, continuing endlessly without really understanding why.
In that regard, Ridiculous Fishing is the perfect video game. Its goals are ultimately meaningless, but it manages to cleverly hypnotise their importance directly into our sub conscious. It’s only when we consciously ask, ‘what am I doing here? Why am I doing this?’ that the illusion is lost. The smoke and mirrors diffuse. We leave the trance confused, our brains clouded with the fuzziness of a faint hangover.
On the weekend I finished Ridiculous Fishing. I achieved the final goal. I had no idea I was supposed to be heading towards this goal until I had already achieved it. I had been too engrossed in the intricacies of chasing multiple carrots simultaneously; I was so lost in its endless progress cycle that I never stopped to wonder if the cycle actually had an end.
But it did. Ridiculous Fishing has an ending and it took me by surprise. It was quite poignant, or at least it felt that way. In hindsight it’s hard to distinguish whether I was actually touched or it was just another magic trick; self-justification for the hours spent chasing arbitrary objectives.
All I know is, when it was over, I was plunked back into my ship, fishing rod in hand, ready to dip my lure into the depths of the ocean one last time.
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