How To Fish makes zero sense — and that’s the point

Fishing games are usually about patience, peaceful lakes and waiting for the perfect bite. How To Fish apparently looked at that formula and decided it needed guns, ridiculous physics and several friends making terrible decisions together.

Released on Steam on August 20, How To Fish comes from Dazed Games, a tiny Swedish studio formed by just two programmers, Carl-Vilhelm Johansson and Melvin Olsson. Somehow, their wonderfully silly take on fishing has turned into one of 2026’s biggest indie surprises.

Within only two days, the game had passed one million sales, while its Steam player count kept climbing throughout launch weekend. It eventually reached a peak of more than 340,000 concurrent players, numbers that would be impressive for a major release, never mind a game created by two guys with an unusual opinion about what fishing should involve.

This is technically a fishing game

The funniest thing about How To Fish is that fishing almost feels like an excuse for everything else happening around it.

The game starts with you and your friends crashing onto an island after a boating trip goes badly. From there, the objective is supposedly to fish, make money and eventually find your way home. What actually happens is considerably less sensible.

Players can catch fish, sell them, buy better equipment and travel toward new islands, but the process quickly escalates. Fish can be smacked around, launched through the air or taken out with firearms. You can perform ridiculous trick shots, hunt bigger creatures, fight bosses, gamble your earnings and generally turn a relaxing afternoon by the water into something resembling an action game held together by fishing line.

It supports multiplayer, too, which is where the physics-based nonsense really comes alive. How To Fish is basically designed to create those moments where everyone stops caring about progression because somebody just launched a fish across the map and decided to shoot it with a sniper rifle.

And that may be exactly why it became so viral. The game is constantly generating funny clips worth sharing, while its low price makes convincing a group of friends to join surprisingly easy.

There are deeper systems, upgrades and objectives underneath all the silliness, but How To Fish understands something important: sometimes the best multiplayer games are the ones where completing the objective becomes the least interesting thing you can possibly do.

If this wonderfully unhinged fishing trip sounds like your kind of weekend, use our price comparison tool to find the best prices for How To Fish and see how cheaply you can convince the rest of your squad to start fishing badly.