More fish – Idle Clicker

To start, despite its name, More fish – Idle Clicker is not an idle game (at least not until towards the end of the game). Incremental? Yes. Clicker? Kinda. You start with a hex grid where some tiles are water-filled pools of fish and others are dry land. Instead of clicking, you hover over a pool for about two seconds to catch the fish inside, then you move on to the next pool of your choice. You have around 20 seconds until the round ends, after which you collect your spoils: coins, pearls, runes, and other items. Coins can be spent to unlock nodes in a massive skill tree, pearls to unlock rarer fish, and a combination of these two resources to buy new bobbers. Each bobber covers a specific radius and has a specific fishing time among other stats; the bigger the radius, the better, as positioning over multiple pools allows you to fish from all of them simultaneously.

Progression is satisfying and well-balanced against the income you earn from an average round. As you advance through the skill tree, costs to buy or upgrade nodes increase, but your earning potential scales nicely with them. Runes seem to impact the gameplay the most; equipping them to your preferred bobber changes how much you earn and adds various other modifiers. You can transform your earned XP into coins or vice versa, or you can change the interaction mode from hovering to swiping up and many other similar gimmicks. It’s really fun to find synergies between them depending on what you need the most in your current round. Conveniently, these can be freely unequipped and moved to a different bobber at any point between rounds. Additionally, random weather effects can occur during fishing, adding another mechanic that can vary your income.

The game does transform into an idle game, but only after unlocking the whole skill tree and a hefty amount of runes, bobbers, and bonuses, which essentially happens towards the end of the game. At that point, the limited time that you have during one round can be infinitely extended by equipping a certain rune. You still need to actively interact with the game if you want faster progression, but you can also let it collect fish and pearls at a slow pace if you prefer so.

More fish – Idle Clicker is a relaxing game with great pacing but one that requires constant interaction until late / end game. The game currently does not have achievements, but the dev mentioned that they will add this feature soon. It’s one of the shorter incremental games on Steam, taking only about 4 hours to fully unlock all the content, which for me is yet another positive aspect.