izigame.me

I really hope this game can recover from the review dip, because it is genuinely a real gem now (if still a bit rough around the edges).
You play as an elderly character dealing with the loss of their partner. Your adult daughter is in town to help you with moving on by assisting the town with their big centennial festival. You open a seafood streetfood shop to raise money, which also leads you to investigate the mysteries plaguing the fishers of the bay.
The game offers a wide range of tasks:
- Rod fishing
- Net fishing
- Trap fishing
- Line fishing
- Cooking
- Exploration
- Photo mode
- Cleaning up trash in the sea
- Tasks for the townfolk
- Providing townsfolk with their favourite dish
- Renovating the town
- Boss fights (more puzzles than fights, which I like)
Early on, the game gives you almost complete control over how you want to allot your time. Lots of tasks can be done in parallel, there's always something to do. A lot of the gameplay is dexterity-based button pressing, though. I found the timing of these tasks very generous overall, but it's not suitable for everyone.
What the game does NOT have:
- Farming
- Ranching
- Breeding
- Crafting
- Fighting
- Mining
- Decorating your house
- Romance
- Complex friendship
(I didn't miss any of these aside from more decorations. I found it relaxing to not be in charge of absolutely everything for a change. :D)
I really thought the repetitive cooking minigames would annoy me, but to my surprise, they didn't. They were just interactive enough to keep the lizard brain occupied while the rest of my brain could chill in a hammock. I liked the different tools, and the mastery system to unlock new recipes is cool. Unlocking every dish is a ton of work though, but you only need that for the respective achievement.
The game features unlimited inventory right off the bat, which is a blessing for a digital hoarder like me. Sadly, it lacks some QoL features on this front, but it's not egregious.
Time runs on a day / night cycle, but without seasonal mechanics. You can pass time faster by sitting on benches, reading in your nook, or sleeping. You can sleep anytime and wake up in the morning, in the afternoon, or at night. Sometimes, time is slowed to a crawl for story events. Cooking doesn't take up any time.
I experienced a couple of bugs, but I never lost any significant progress or had to use the emergency teleport. If your boat gets stuck, you can call an in-game tow service, and the save system is incredibly generous. You can save almost anywhere / anytime and the game autosaves after sleeping.
I can't say anything about mouse/keyboard, but playing with controller was perfectly fine.
I'm not the biggest fan of the blocky artstyle in general. But the animations are incredibly fluid and done with a whole lot of love. The fish models in particular are super quirky and cute. Checking out the aquarium displays is something you should definitely do. And later with the line fishing, the models really have their time to shine.
You have a dog, and you can pet it.
The soundtrack is nice and never became grating or repetitive.
There is a co-op option, but I haven't tried it.
I can wholeheartedly recommend this game. It's definitely worth full price, I got ~40 hours out of it and haven't gotten 100% yet.

Not very playable with keyboard and mouse unfortunately, ran into usability issues less than 10 mins in which means it probably had very little testing for the UI options at the very least.
For those trying to play on mouse and keyboard here are the issues that might softlock you 5 mins in:
- Fishing Journal: If you are stuck in the fishing journal when your daughter tells you to select the lure then try the return / backspace key as this is the universal exit menu button instead of something more common like esc, it is also not displayed at this point and locks you from accessing the keybind menu so you wouldn't know right up until this point to check it. This means without googling the keybinds you have to restart the game from the beginning as it also doesn't autosave at this point.
- Options Menu: If you go into the options menu you are presented with just the confirm option to get out but again there is the hidden option of backspace to get out of the menu (devs if you're reading this displaying the menu back out option is conventional and should be done here as there is more than enough screen space on a 1080p monitor).
- Fishing: At the start you learn how to strike which unless you use two hands on the keyboard will be quite difficult and keep you locked trying to complete the tutorial, I recommend using one hand for space and holding right shift and then the other for the strike / reel direction. (I would rather it have the option of using the mouse direction for this instead of the wasd buttons as I think this puts it in line with the console version and means less buttons for the user and less hand scrunching in the keyboard)
Will probably pick this back up when I get home (where my controller is) from the holidays as overall the game still appeals to me but it really needs a controller to play comfortably at this point. I know these probably seem like very minor issues to most folk but accessibility of a game directly effects how much I want to play it. If I have to keep restarting the first moments of a game cause I keep getting trapped in menus then those moments are dedicated to frustration rather than getting me hooked into the story / gameplay loop.
Edit: After doing some reading online I realise this is probably never going to be fixed as people have been writing articles about these keyboard controls since October 2021 as well as how inconsistent some of the buttons are for menu interactions (return, enter, and space changing functions occasionally)

I purchased the game on sale for 4.99 at that price point it seems worth the chance even with the negative reviews.
So far it's cute but the keyboard and mouse controls are very clunky, and it's a bit off-putting the way the layout is designed so poorly that it feels like you're expected to play with a controller on PC. The keyboard controls are very difficult to use even with attempting to remap because everything seems to require multiple different button presses which prior to re-mapping is difficult to do quickly due to the layout. This isn't game breaking, but I would generally expect the control scheme to be more straight forward and not need to be modified by the player in order to make the game feel playable without a controller. Cooking for example requires multiple different steps, one of which has you to press one button to start the cook, then keep a line between a small area which moves in a circle or in a straight line, for certain parts of the cooking process where the circular area is used this is incredibly difficult with a WASD layout, to the point that it doesn't even feel like it's worth the effort. Timing a button press is fine and with practice becomes second nature, but the balancing act with the line in the circle is tedious and difficult to get the line to go in the proper direction on a keyboard.

I've ran into a few issues where the game will tell me I can do something but after attempting to do it, it doesn't seem to be working as intended. I did the tutorial for the net, things worked fine, I was then instructed to use the net to catch fish by casting it over grey pools of fish in the water, yet no matter how many times I do this I can not seem to catch anything with the net. I've tried altering my angle, getting closer to the pool and getting further away and no matter how many times I try I simply can not get the net to work. I'm still able to catch fish with the rod so it's not as if the game is unplayable, but the net function seems to be bugged for me. It's also a bit frustrating when casting your line with the rod. You need to hold spacebar to increase your distance, but if you don't immediately let go of the spacebar after the line casts it starts to reel the line back in, which defeats the purpose of trying to cast your line out further to begin with. You're also required to hold spacebar while reeling a fish in and pressing additional buttons as when the fish moves in a different direction to keep from losing the fish. Initially I lost the first few fish I tried to catch because my game kept minimizing due to sticky keys trying to enable from hitting WASD and shift repeatedly. It's unclear if you're meant to continue pressing WASD repeatedly when you are catching the fish to pull them in a certain direction or if a single button press, or press and hold is sufficient, the direction the game gives is unclear and I opted to simply disable sticky keys to prevent the game from minimizing repeatedly when trying to fish.
For 5 dollars it's fine, but at it's normal price of 25 without discounts, it's a bit of a hard sell with how unintuitive the controls are on PC and some of the apparent bugs I've encountered so far.