Incremental Fishing

Incremental Fishing opens its own store page with a note from its developer rather than a list of features: "This is my very first game on Steam... I don't have a big team or a big budget - just a strong desire to create worlds and stories that make people feel something." That framing matters, because the game it's attached to is exactly what it promises to be — a short, calm, click-driven incremental about catching fish and upgrading a boat — and most of what goes right and wrong about it reads like a first release finding its feet in public rather than a cynical asset flip.

A calm click-to-fish loop

The pitch is simple: click on fish swimming across the screen to catch them, spend the proceeds on upgrades and skill-tree nodes, and watch the ocean around you gradually open up into new biomes. Early reviewers respond to it warmly and specifically. One Russian-language review calls it "surprisingly satisfying and addictive... super meditative, and the skill tree gives a great sense of progression as your school of fish grows." An English review in the same vein: "description tells you exactly what you are getting and I feel like it's been put together really well... on a proper incremental buzz at the moment and this is scratching the itch." For a genre that lives or dies on whether the click itself feels good, that reaction is the important one, and by most accounts here it does.

The bugs that came with launch

The most detailed critical review is worth reading in full for anyone considering a purchase, because it's specific rather than vague. It describes the click target growing larger as the talent tree fills in, to the point that "you can't see the outer edges" and it becomes hard to tell where the cursor actually is; some talent-tree text rendering garbled; and fish occasionally becoming immune to the click area of effect for no visible reason. The same reviewer calls the overall feel "vibecoded" — a specific, pointed accusation about how carefully the systems were built, not just a complaint about difficulty. A second, unrelated review reports a related but distinct problem: the game ending and dropping the player back to the beginning without warning, mid-run, costing them an achievement they'd been working toward and any appetite for redoing the two hours it took to get there.

An hour or two, then nothing else to do

The bigger structural issue is what happens after the talent tree is actually finished. The same detailed critical review describes reaching the end of the tree "in an hour, expecting some sort of ascension mechanic, but that's it" — no prestige loop, no meaningful reason to keep playing, and no way to reset and start over even for players who wanted to. That's corroborated by Steam's own achievement data: within two days of launch, the "complete the game" and "buy every upgrade" achievements already sit at roughly 40% and 38% of the player base respectively — very high completion rates this early, and a clear sign that "short" here means genuinely an hour or two rather than the dozens of hours incremental fans sometimes expect from the genre. One reviewer's summary doubles as fair warning: "Short but fun! Gratz on your first game!"

A solo developer's first Steam game

Context matters here. This is a one-person, self-published debut, built (by the developer's own account) working solo every day toward a longer-term goal of making narrative-driven games in the mould of Frostpunk, Ixion and Don't Starve. At NZ$7.91, with save-anytime, adjustable text size, custom volume controls and a mouse-only option built in from the start, it's priced and built like exactly what it is — a small, earnest first step rather than a finished commercial product competing with the genre's bigger names. That's not an excuse for the bugs above, but it is useful context for how much polish to expect for the price being asked.

Final verdict

Incremental Fishing gets the one thing a game like this absolutely has to get right: the click itself feels good, and the short climb through its talent tree is genuinely relaxing for the people it's clicking with. What's currently missing is everything around that core loop holding up under scrutiny — a target circle that reportedly outgrows the screen, garbled text, an unexplained hard reset, and no reason to keep playing once the (short) content is exhausted. At under NZ$8 it's a low-risk way to spend an evening and support a first-time solo developer, but set expectations for a rough, brief debut rather than a fully finished incremental.