Fish Simulator: Agonik Lake.
Or, really, this is just a post about what a fish simulator would be in my imagination. I got this piece of shit for $2.50, knowing it was going to be a simple arcadey game, and that's okay. Not everything needs to be a deep simulation; indeed, some of the best things I've ever played were little toy games I got for a few bucks, and in part because they have such refined gameplay. But there is a difference between simple gamey gameplay and not having gameplay. I mean, I like Mitos.is and Worm.is quite a bit.
Fish Simulator's conceit is you are a fish trying to bulk up to pass arbitrary gates until you beat the lake, I guess. You have a health bar, your enemies have health bars if they're big enough relative to you to fight back. As of yet I have been unable to find skill or combat in it; it seems like there's no real relation between where their mouth is and where you are, no opportunity for hit and run tactics. If you are close enough it is just attrition and it isn't worth fighting over. Aside from that, there are eagles and fishermen that each have some tactic (button press) that deals with them, and come on suddenly like a jumpscare/QTE. It's basically a Flash game that, in this Age of Steam, had the gall to sell itself for money.
And the shame is, a fish simulation could actually be very good without requiring a ton more depth. Now, some of this depth would come from having literal depth, 3D environments instead of a 2D plane. The first thing is, take the fishermen as an example. There are tons of fishing games, even tons of fishing minigames due to the Japanese, but when have you ever gotten to play fishing from the fish's perspective? The fishermen acts as a one hit kill over a wide area, and you have a lives system and respawn in the same spot, so it's basically more like another type of health bar. Well, imagine if instead you got to fight the fisherman. If you were fast and came from the right angle you could steal the bait. If you get caught, then you could:
1) Fight him reeling in, maybe like a mimicry game or something, timing your "swim harder" button for when you need it to stress the line
2) Tangle yourself in underwater foliage and objects. The game has scenery, but no actual interactable stuff. Tangling would be a way to stress the line more.
If you want to go crazy with it, you might portray the fish as having the limited perspective of a fish. You feel a sort of sonar (I assume fish do sense vibrations in the water?), a crude sight, and a sense of smell (Ancestors did a great job of portraying smell as basically being its version of Eagle Vision/Batman vision and implementing it in a way that felt natural). You can see the lake floor in full majesty, but other critters are hidden behind fog of war. Now you have to sense out when things are hitting the water, not knowing if they're berries falling in, bugs landing, fish splashing, fishhooks, etc. I mean, you can tell. There could be learning (oh, that's cheese, so it's definitely bait, whereas worms may or may not be bait), and of course the nature of it (like a bigger splash vs a smaller splash), but mind games would be a big part of it. Imagine a multiplayer version of this with asymmetric fisherman vs fish gameplay!
The game also has a dodge button that's fucking useless except on the fisherman, which doesn't make sense. Suppose instead if you could hide yourself in foliage to avoid predators or lay ambushes. If it was 3D (basically small-scale Maneater, then) you could have proper chases.
Finally, layer on some basic ecology like fishing games do with different biomes (by a beach, shore underneath tree cover, deep ditch in the middle of the river) with different animal and fisherman patterns for different biomes at different times of day.
Overall, a fish simulator would be awesome if thought and care was put into making it, basically make it be about being the legendary folk hero fish that town lore has given a name - the 50 billion pound catfish that eats Boy Scouts or whatever - as a clever subversion of the fishing genre. To, rather than chasing that "great white whale," to be that great white whale after clawing your way to the top of the food chain.
I also would like a Maneater game about being a whale in the golden age of whaling, but that will never happen.
