When your sport(s) of the 12 months largely include psychological horror and back-to-back, brutal boss fights — as mine did — you’ll virtually positively want one thing mindlessly stress-free to chill with. Positive sufficient, as I wrapped up my time wandering across the streets of Silent Hill 2, an cute, unsuspecting sport started doing the rounds on social media: Webfishing.
Webfishing is straightforward. You fish. That’s it. After hours of deciphering Silent Hill 2’s ending circumstances, fishing is all I needed to do.
Positive, Webfishing does have a bit extra to it than simply fishing. There’s a chat perform, and in the end, the concept is that you just make pals — or grasp along with your current pals — and chat whereas ready for a fish to chew. There’s cosmetics, upgrades, and even playing, however not the predatory kind; Webfishing, luckily, doesn’t require you to spend a penny past the £4.29 that the sport really prices.
Positive sufficient, myself and a detailed good friend set to work catching fish and rapidly spent most of our earnings on scratchcards. Our newfound earnings, which weren’t actually earnings in any respect, had been rapidly spent on cosmetics and higher bait. Higher bait means larger fish, and the fish in Webfishing get actually huge…
And what occurs while you catch these huge fish? Most of the time, you’ll discover different people — who all appear to be Animal Crossing characters, by the best way — cheering for you in chat. I’ve had a few of my nicest, most harmless of on-line interactions all 12 months in Webfishing.
An extremely easy premise with, for essentially the most half, a beautiful playerbase and neighborhood. In a single random foyer that I joined, hoping to quietly fish whereas watching YouTube, I joined a gaggle of individuals fishing from a bathroom. One of many many issues you are able to do in Webfishing that I didn’t know existed on the time. One other participant introduced out a guitar and commenced taking requests from others, whereas all of us continued to fish from the identical, small rest room.
On one other event, myself and my good friend determined to spend our Saturday night having some in-game (and actual!) beers whereas taking part in Webfishing and catching up on one another’s lives. Our server rapidly went from simply the 2 of us to a number of pixelated cats and canines gathering on the pier to talk about something and all the pieces, get drunk on in-game wine, and naturally, fish.
There have been a couple of casualties to the wine, however all in all, logging right into a sport to fish along with your good friend after which discovering your self chatting to an entire array of like-minded, LGBTQIA+ folks whereas doing so isn’t one thing I essentially anticipated from Webfishing after I first put in it. I used to be pleasantly stunned, and it’s what retains me coming again. That, and fishing, after all. There’s an actual kick from catching a fish so huge that it clips by means of the map. Although, not a lot of a kick from then spending your whole earnings from it on scratchcards, and shedding most of them.
Webfishing is weird and surreal at the very best of instances, particularly while you witness your good friend parkour from one aspect of the map to the opposite — meowing frantically your complete time, as a result of that’s a factor you are able to do — however there’s one thing simply so pretty about all of it. Webfishing is a small nook of the web the place — when hackers aren’t attempting to wreck the enjoyable — you possibly can actually swap off and chill out for some time. Fish, gamble, parkour. Push folks into the ocean. Get wine drunk on the pier. Webfishing is an underrated gem and a uncommon place of respite for players who want a break from all of it.
