fishrooms

It's after hours at the municipal baths. The lights are still on, the water is still warm, and the attendant is still at his counter, weighing whatever you pull out of the pools. He insists it's all fish. fishrooms is a slow, unsettling fishing game set in an empty indoor swimming complex, lit and rendered like a PS2-era game. Cast into the pools, sell your catch for tokens, and buy admission to the rooms further in: warmer, darker, and less sure of what they're for. What's inside • New: land it like an arcade cabinet. Hooking a fish starts a game of Stacker. Stop each row of lamps on the one below; whatever hangs over falls away, and every row runs faster. At the LANDED line, take your fish, or keep stacking to the TROPHY line for twice the value and a bigger fish, and lose it if you slip. Perfect rows add to the catch, and rarer fish need taller, faster stacks. • New: every fish rebuilt. All 37 specimens are new models, each based on a real animal (a common carp, a moray, a lungfish, a mola, a John Dory, an axolotl the attendant still calls a fish), with photographic skins that look wet when you hold them up. • Every catch is a crate. Whatever you hook comes out of the water as a plain fish under a broadcast mosaic. Then a reel of cards spins past a marker, slows to a crawl, and stops on what you actually caught: pale for common, blue for unusual, violet for rare, red for impossible. The gold card is something else entirely. Species you've never caught are a dark "?" until the reel lands on one. • Six baths. The Municipal baths, the Therapy pool, the Service bath, the Night laundry, the Winter garden and the Last platform, each with six species of its own. • 37 specimens. A keyhole bream with something looking through from the other side, a receipt eel whose total is always one more than you have, a sole that has been watching the same door since 1998. Everything you catch is kept in your fish album as a model you can turn over. • People who stayed after closing. The attendant, lifeguard, waiting woman, laundress and porter have new faces, clothes and poses. The regulars remember what you asked them. Commissions pay for particular catches, some of them settled in person. • Something remembered. Some catches carry more than their weight. Listen closely in the catch bag, and see what the baths remember. The clue remains with you after the fish is gone. • The sitting room. Its glass doors open for 10 memories from a Return, and stay open for good. A television watches the other baths on closed-circuit cameras and finds the one where the water has started to move. The room's own pool fishes whichever bath is on screen. There's a specimen tank, and a sofa if you need to close your eyes for a minute. • Tackle and progress. Seven rods; reel, line, bait and bag upgrades that steady or shorten the stack; a collection bonus for each bath; and the Return, which starts a new visit with memories that make every later one easier. • Something else in the water. One catch doesn't belong to any pool. Quiet mode removes its scare, but not the fish. Play together Fish alone, or open the baths to up to eight anglers. The water is kinder with company: every other angler makes everyone's catches worth 10% more, with sooner bites, steadier rows and rarer fish. Press Enter to chat, and hold Tab to see who's here, where they are and what they've caught. Everyone keeps their own bag, tokens and admissions, so a door someone else has paid for stays shut for you. Global leaderboards for fish caught, album entries and the best single catch are on the title screen and in the pause menu. Controls • WASD walk · Shift sprint · Mouse look • Left mouse: cast, strike, stop a row, keep stacking, hurry the reel · Right mouse: take the fish at the LANDED line, take your line back • E interact · J fish album · Tab catch bag (hold for the scoreboard with company) · Enter chat · Esc pause, travel, equipment, leaderboards, settings, back to the title, quit Presentation Lit the way PS2 games were: light baked into the geometry from the actual lamps, per-vertex fog, alpha-blended water with low-resolution reflections, and a 448-line console output you can turn off in the pause menu. Progress saves automatically.