izigame.me

I have to say, I'm shocked by how well reviewed this game is.

TLDR:
A very tedious and repetitive grindfest and series of fetch quests with a "sanity mechanic" that aim at making the process as needlessly time consuming as possible without adding anything else to the game (not even any real horror element).
Don't get fooled into thinking this is a chill, relaxing or even spooky game where the focus is on your and your fishing adventures, because this isn't the case.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm actually sad about this game. I really wanted to like it, everything I saw about this game so far looked fun and interesting.

What I expected from the glimpses I took from various streams, the steam page and the review was a chill fishing game where you explore the seas, live off your catches and have to deal with some spooky Lovecraftian shenanigans that would make fishing at night an interesting challenge.

What I got instead was one of the most shallow experience I've ever had without any of these elements. It was instead of very by the book, almost MMO-like series of fetchquest and grinds without even an interesting gameplay to back it up.

The navigation is uninspired. Weather, Wind, Waves, basically nothing matter in the slightest (I think, in some very rare occasion the wind may impact your deplacement? Maybe? The fact that I beat the game and I'm still not sure just hilight how unimpactful it is anyway).

The fishing is uninteresting. A simple QTE with different variants that all could be boild down to "press the buttom when the green thing get in the target". I've honestly seen more engaging and impactful fishing minigames in other games where fishing is a very small side activity, but there it's the main activity.

The overal story is very linear and basically a very long and uninspired chain of MMO quest style tasks, almost entirely made of fetch quests. Complete a couple of thos and you've cleared one of the 4 corners of the map.
Complete all the 4 corners and you've completed the game.

But all that could be handwaved if the game was actually fun and engaging... sadly its not.
You just go in a straight line toward the next zone.

Find the quest.

Struggle a bit to understand exactly what you are supposed to do (or rather where exactly you are supposed to go), rince and repeat until it's done. At least one zone had a side quest (which was basically find the 3 fishing spots that glow yellow) and it gave me a reward that is pretty underwhelming.

And all that with the god awful day/night timer that forces you to constantly run back and forth between the spot you are trying to clear and the nearest port, because if you don't regularly go there and hit the "sleep" button, you will be bombarded by various bullshit until you die and have to restart from your last save.

The game present itself as if it has some kind of lovecraftian survival element (I've even seen some hacks try to tag this game as "horror game", which is hilarious), where you have to manage your sanity like a ressource and some time have to push against the madness, but that's not the case, once you realize how basic the game is, it lose any hint of suspense of fear.

Night come, you can't seen anything so you can't really keep fishing, and if you stay anyway your sanity drop. Once it's low random damaging entity, from giant fishes to heat seeking tornados will go after you constantly attacking you and making fishing basically impossible as you turn into a sitting duck while doing so, so you have to stop what you were doing, get to the nearest port and sleep, then go back where you left off and start again.

You will basically spend 80% of your time going back and forth between your fishing spot and the port until you get some upgrades that will slowly make things better but that's pretty late in the game. Remove that and the game could probably be completed in 2 hours, and I'm not even joking.

Once you get hit you will lose cargo space, which mean one of the fishes you already caught, or one of your gear (and if one of your engine got bit you'll have the joy of being slowed down to a crawl, which makes the process of getting back to the port even slower). And since damages can only be repaired in one specific port per zone, getting hit will ruin your day.

Once you get to the port, you can repair any damage for basically no money and your sanity is fully replenished in seconds, without any other effect.

I cleared 99% of the content, leaving only a handful of quest (the cultists asking me a very specific rare fish, which I honestly couldn't be bothered to play gatcha for, and a quest where I had to find a home for a random dog... no prompt ever showed up so here's that).

The only reason why I stuck with the game till the end was first to be able to make that review, and second because I am the kind of autistic individual that can't let a progress bar unfilled, but god knows filling these bars was one of the most unrewarding experience I've ever had.

The ship itself is just a giant ressource sink with basically no choices others than in what order you want to complete the grind.
You can't chose a ship type, you can't really "make a build", it's all very linear. (Here's a protip for you, focus on the fishing gear first as its literally the only real "gear check" the game will throw at you. You will need a specific type of gear to fish into a specific region, so just max fishing gear, get the omni tools that let you fish everything and you are done).

You quickly realize that basically none of what should be the core gameplay (exploring the sea and fishing stuff) matter.
The money you'll get from fish is only useful to upgrade the boat and buy the couple of fishing pole required to fish in all zone, and the money isn't even the real roadblock here, it's the wood, metal and cloth you get from Dredring (roll credit), so you'll spend most of your early game desperately looking for these specific fishing spots between the rest of your fetch quests and... that's it.

At some point I got hit by how painfully pointless everything is here. I could have a good time fishing because of the constant back and forth with the closest port because of the sanity mechanic, I couldn't really explore because of that mechanic once again, so the only thing I can really do is grind as fast as possible the couple of upgrade I could slap on my boat to make that process less painful and keep doing the fetch quests.

The game try to pretend you have an impact on the growth of the world around you, like the starting town growing thanks to you, but it's all window dressing and fake. There is no comerce that would require you to go to specific regions to sell specific fishes at better prices. There is no economy, not other fishermen you could encounter at sea, nothing.

You don't have any choices outside of a last second choice between Good Ending and Bad Ending (the bad ending has a pretty cool cinematic shot tbf) and that's it.

I bought the game on a decent 45% discount and I still feel rippedoff. Not of my money, but of my time.
I sunk 14h in it and and wish to get them back.

I've had deeper and more engaging fishing boat experience in MMOs like FF14 or ArchAge.
I've had more interesting lovercraftian sea exploration games like Sunless Sky.
I've had better boat navigation game overall like Blackflag, Sea of Thief or even Zelda wind walker.
And I've had better "chill, do busy work and fill the bar" games like Stardew Valley, Factorio or Grave Digger.

This game is just worthless and I'm baffled by the fact that so many people seem to have enjoyed the experience.