Weird catch

How to play Weird catch

You get three dives. Drag anywhere on the water to steer your lantern hook, or use the arrow keys on a desktop. On the way down the rule is simple: keep clear of the junk, because the first boot or crate you clip snags the line and hauls you straight back up, so you never reach the good stuff. Once you touch the bottom the hook reels back up, and now every creature you brush against comes with you. There are ten hooks on the line, so what you pick up matters: a rusty can takes a slot a Ghost anchovy could have used, and each piece of junk costs you twenty at the dock. Surface with nothing but creatures and you get a clean line bonus. Three dives make a run, and every species you land goes into your logbook for good.

Tips

• The valuable creatures live deep, so a clean descent pays you twice
• Ten hooks is not many, steer around the junk and save the slots for fish
• Junk is worth nothing, drags the reel and costs twenty each at the dock
• A clean line is worth sixty on its own, sometimes it pays to skip that last crate

About Weird catch

Fishing games work because of one very old feeling: you have something on the line and you do not yet know what it is. Weird catch leans all the way into that. The lake is full of invented nonsense, from the Grumpy guppy in the shallows to the Pale colossus sitting on the bottom, and the only way to see the strange ones is to risk a long dive. Nothing here can wipe out a run, so the decisions are about greed rather than disaster: ten hooks, a lake full of things worth wildly different amounts, and a dock that charges you for every boot you bring home. The logbook gives you a reason to keep diving after the score stops being interesting.

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