HomeReviewsRussian Fishing 4
Premature Evaluation: Russian Fishing 4Teach a man to fish
Teach a man to fish
Developer:Russian FishingPublisher:Russian FishingRelease:Out nowOn:Windows, Mac, LinuxFrom:SteamFor:Free
Today’sRussian Fishing 4patch fixes a bug in which you could place an entire wheel of cheese on your hook, harking back to that golden age in which man held total dominion over beast, and could deposit entire units of groceries into their homes without scrutiny. A baguette in an estuary. A cheese in a lagoon. A ham in a pond. An egg in a fjord. This is a free to play fishing simulator with microtransactions and RPG-style survival elements. You assume the role of a fisherperson, requiring only food, coffee, and the raw thrill of the sport to stay awake around the clock, as you drag fish after fish out of the wetness to sustain your bizarre and self-imposed lifestyle.
One thing I can’t recall about the times I went fishing with my dad, is quite how long it took for a fish to bite. Memory has a way of recording over the boring parts and leaving you with only the highlights. I do remember baiting a hook (not simulated here), casting a spinning reel (simulated with a simple force meter and some wind considerations), and bashing a fish over a rock in fright when one bit me (not simulated, though mildly traumatic), but if my foggy memory serves, the rate at which fish bite inRussian Fishing 4is just as slow and conducive to tedium as it is in the real world. You’ll spend whole minutes eyes-locked on to your float, waiting to see it twitch or vanish, your limited spare time evaporating as you do.
This is as much a criticism of fishing as it is Russian Fishing 4, but you can’t help imagining your future self on their deathbed, glaring at you backwards through time as you sit motionless and mouth agape in front of your screen, extinguishing your precious minutes as though they would never run out. The float finally disappears beneath the surface, you hold the left mouse button, and yank out a 19 centimetre perch. It gawps at you accusingly, the light glinting through its translucent fins, catching its finely detailed, bump-mapped scales. Other players’ catches appear in real time in the corner of the display. Somebody called “coronavirus22” has caught a record breaking 1.2kg carp, a sobering snapshot of who – or what – you might eventually become if you kept playing.
And so, I put my rod down and step away from the riverbank, turning to face the surrounding woods. An invisible wall prevents me from leaving the designated fishing zone, though with some well-timed sprinting and probing of the fence I manage to break out of this glass cage. I push on into the wilderness, the trees gradually losing their definition until they are simple cardboard cutouts. I am a goldfish escaped from its bowl. The landscape flattens out into a featureless plain.
At the edge of the world is sharp oblivion. The sky reaches down beneath the earth and on and on and on. There are no fish here, and so I cast my rod and wait.
