How to Fish Review – The Fishing Game That Exploded on Steam

Overview

How to Fish sounds like the title of a peaceful fishing simulator. In reality, it is a game where fishing can quickly turn into shooting sea creatures, throwing explosives into the water, gambling away your earnings, fighting oversized bosses, and accidentally attacking your friends.

Developed and published by Dazed Games, How to Fish is a physics-driven first-person game designed for one to four players. After a boating accident leaves you stranded on an island, the solution to getting home is apparently to become very good at catching fish. What begins with basic equipment gradually escalates into an increasingly ridiculous arsenal of weapons and tools.

That absurd escalation is the entire appeal. How to Fish is not interested in being an authentic fishing simulator or a serious survival game. Instead, it takes a simple progression loop and surrounds it with unpredictable physics, co-op chaos, strange enemies, trick shots, gambling, and enough questionable decision-making to keep a group of friends entertained.

The game has also become one of 2026’s surprise multiplayer hits. Just days after launch, How to Fish exploded in popularity on Steam, reaching a peak of more than 268,000 concurrent players. That sudden success makes even more sense once you start playing: it is cheap, easy to understand, built around co-op chaos, and constantly produces the kind of ridiculous moments players want to share with friends.

Story and Setting

The premise is deliberately simple. You have been drinking while boating, the trip goes badly, and you end up stranded on a small island. If you want to make your way home, you need to start fishing.

There is no elaborate survival narrative or large cast of carefully developed characters. The story mostly exists to push you from one island to another while introducing tougher creatures, new equipment, bosses, and increasingly strange situations.

This works because How to Fish never pretends that the story is its main attraction. The islands function more like playgrounds than traditional narrative environments. Merchants and quest-givers provide goals, fish provide money, bosses block progress, and every new location gives you another excuse to experiment with whatever ridiculous equipment you have managed to buy.

The result feels closer to an adventure built around memorable co-op stories than a campaign built around scripted storytelling. The moments you remember are likely to involve a failed boss fight, an impossible trick shot, a valuable fish disappearing at exactly the wrong moment, or one of your friends causing a disaster.

Gameplay

Fishing sits at the center of the progression system, but How to Fish quickly demonstrates that it has a very loose definition of fishing.

You catch creatures, sell what you collect, earn money, and use that money to improve your equipment. Better gear allows you to deal with tougher targets and eventually reach additional islands. Quests and bosses give the progression some structure while rare fish variants provide something extra for players who enjoy collecting.

The difference is that conventional fishing equipment is only part of your toolbox. Weapons gradually enter the equation, turning encounters with marine life into something closer to an improvised first-person shooter. Shotguns, automatic weapons, explosives, melee attacks, and other increasingly excessive methods can become just as important as the fishing rod.

There are even rewards for stylish kills and trick shots, encouraging players to launch fish through the air and find unnecessarily complicated ways to finish them off. It gives an otherwise basic money-and-upgrade loop much more personality.

None of the individual systems are especially deep. The strength comes from how they interact. Physics can interfere with an easy catch, another player can accidentally ruin a fight, an explosion can scatter everything across the area, and a simple task can turn into several minutes of chaos.

Co-op and Physics

How to Fish can be played alone, but multiplayer is where its design makes the most sense.

With up to four players running around the same island, the unpredictable physics become part of the entertainment. Players can cooperate during difficult encounters, split up while earning money, compare equipment, or simply make life considerably more difficult for one another.

The loose physics system also means that interactions rarely feel completely controlled. Characters, objects, fish, and explosions can behave in ways that turn an ordinary situation into something much funnier than the developers could have created through a scripted sequence.

That style of comedy works especially well in co-op because nobody needs to actively tell a joke. Someone missing a shot, losing control of an object, being thrown across the area, or accidentally hitting another player provides the comedy naturally.

Solo players can still progress through the game and experience its bosses, weapons, islands, and fishing mechanics, but some of the magic disappears without other people creating additional chaos. How to Fish is fundamentally a social game even though it does not force you to play it that way.

Progression, Bosses and Replayability

The progression loop is straightforward but effective. Catch fish, make money, improve your equipment, complete objectives, defeat bosses, and gain access to more dangerous areas.

New equipment is one of the main reasons to keep moving forward. Starting with limited options makes later weapons feel increasingly absurd, and getting enough money for another upgrade provides a constant short-term objective.

Boss encounters break up the regular fishing and money-making loop with more direct combat. Larger creatures require significantly more punishment than ordinary targets and can become particularly chaotic when several players are attacking at once.

There is also a collection element thanks to rare fish variants. Players interested in completing everything therefore have reasons to spend more time exploring and fishing instead of simply racing toward the next boss.

Gambling provides another wonderfully irresponsible use for your money. Instead of safely investing everything into equipment, you can risk your earnings and potentially leave yourself worse off than before. It fits perfectly with a game where efficiency is rarely as entertaining as making a bad decision.

The biggest limitation is longevity. How to Fish is built around a relatively simple gameplay loop, and once you have seen the islands, equipment and biggest surprises, there is less mechanical depth underneath to keep revealing itself. Multiplayer randomness can extend its life considerably, but this is better approached as a compact co-op experience than a game expected to occupy hundreds of hours.

Visuals and Performance

How to Fish uses a deliberately simple, colorful 3D style that fits its personality extremely well. Characters, fish, environments and weapons have enough detail to remain readable without making the cartoon violence feel unnecessarily graphic.

The exaggerated look also complements the physics. Fish flying through the air, players stumbling around islands, and ridiculous weapons would probably feel very different with a realistic visual style. Here, everything looks like it belongs inside the same bizarre playground.

It is also a relatively lightweight PC game. The official minimum requirements list an Intel Core i5-5257U or Ryzen 3 1200-class processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 460-class graphics card, while the installation requires only around 1 GB of storage.

That makes it accessible to considerably older gaming PCs than most major releases. The physics-heavy nature of the game can still create rough moments when large numbers of objects and explosions are involved, so extremely chaotic situations may produce frame-rate drops even when ordinary gameplay runs smoothly.

Audio

The audio follows the same exaggerated philosophy as the visuals. Weapons have enough impact to make combat satisfying, while environmental sounds keep the islands from feeling completely empty during quieter moments.

More importantly, How to Fish is the kind of game where the people playing it often become part of the soundtrack. Multiplayer communication, reactions to failed plans, accidental attacks and unexpected physics moments contribute as much to the atmosphere as the game’s own sound effects.

The game does not need a cinematic soundtrack or complex soundscape because its strongest moments are built around spontaneous action. The audio simply needs to support that chaos, and for the most part it does.

Final Verdict

How to Fish succeeds because it understands exactly what kind of game it wants to be. It takes fishing, progression and simple first-person combat and combines them with physics, weapons, bosses, gambling and multiplayer chaos until an ordinary fishing trip becomes completely ridiculous.

The core loop is not especially deep, and players looking for a realistic fishing simulator, substantial story or long solo adventure will probably find it limited. Its relatively short progression also means that the novelty will eventually run out.

But judged as a compact co-op game designed to create funny situations, How to Fish is remarkably effective. The inexpensive price, accessible hardware requirements and simple mechanics make it easy for a group to jump into, while the unpredictable physics ensure that even basic objectives can produce memorable moments.

Play it alone and you will find an entertaining little fishing-action game. Bring a few friends and it becomes something considerably better.

Review Score

8.3/10

How to Fish turns a basic fishing progression loop into an absurd co-op playground filled with weapons, physics and unpredictable moments. It is short and deliberately shallow, but with friends it is difficult not to have fun.