Nice Day for Fishing

From Background NPC to Reluctant Hero

Nice Day for Fishing, developed by FusionPlay and published by Team17, takes one of Viva La Dirt League's most recognisable Epic NPC Man characters, Baelin the fisherman, and builds an entire pixel-art RPG around him. The premise leans into the joke directly: when a scripting error in a treasure chest wipes out every adventurer in the world, Honeywood is left with no hero except its resident background NPC, whose only marketable skill is fishing. That skill becomes the game's central combat system, reimagined as timing-based fish battles layered with equippable spells, bait, and gear upgrades, all wrapped in a story stuffed with references to VLDL's sketch catalogue and voiced cameos from familiar characters like Bodger and Baradun. Reception sits at Very Positive across 2,489 total reviews, and an English-language sample pulled for this piece (100 reviews: 72 positive, 28 negative) reflects that overall lean, though the actual text of both the positive and negative reviews tells a more complicated, far more consistent story than the headline score alone suggests.

Genuinely Funny, and a Combat System That Mostly Works

Where the game succeeds, it succeeds clearly. The fish-battling system itself earns broad respect even from reviewers who otherwise struggled with the game, described as a legitimate RPG combat loop rather than a simple minigame, with reviewers highlighting the way spell choices, bait selection, and gear progression open up real build variety, magic-focused builds in particular draw praise as the strongest path. The comedy writing and cameo voice work are the game's other clear strength, with reviewers who know the source material describing genuine delight at recognising specific sketches and catchphrases translated into game form, and several noting that the humour is self-aware enough about tired MMO tropes to land even before the joke wears thin. The pixel art and character sprites draw essentially universal praise regardless of how a given reviewer felt about anything else, and more than one reviewer describes the game as a good "no-thinking," low-pressure experience to unwind with, since there's no fail state and no way to permanently lose a fight. For dedicated VLDL fans, several reviewers frame the purchase explicitly as an act of support for creators they already love, independent of how the game itself holds up, and say that goodwill alone made the experience worthwhile.

A Parody of Tedium That Becomes the Real Thing

The dominant thread running through nearly the entire review sample, on both sides of the recommendation line, is that the game's central joke backfires. Nice Day for Fishing sets out to parody the exhausting, repetitive fetch-quest structure of MMOs and grindy RPGs, and reviewers overwhelmingly agree it succeeds so completely at recreating that tedium that the parody stops being funny and simply becomes the game's actual design. Multiple reviewers break the experience down almost identically: a large share of playtime is walking back and forth across a small handful of zones, fetching an item, returning to a quest-giver, then immediately being sent back for another item in the same location. One widely-seconded example describes a running joke where players retrieve the town blacksmith's lost hammer from the same well roughly twenty times, funny the first few instances, exhausting well before the last. Fast travel exists in the game but is withheld until nearly the very end, meaning the vast majority of a typical eight-to-fifteen-hour playthrough is spent walking the same paths on foot, a design choice several reviewers describe as feeling deliberately, almost punitively, disrespectful of their time rather than an intentional gag. Difficulty spikes compound the frustration for some: specific harder fish and late-game bosses are called disproportionately tanky and poorly explained, with equipment and spell descriptions that don't clearly communicate how they'll affect a fight. A smaller but recurring technical complaint involves saving, several reviewers describe losing hours of progress after quitting to the main menu, having assumed the game would autosave or offer an explicit save option, only to find no continue point waiting for them. Notably, this complaint doesn't split cleanly along recommend versus not-recommend lines, several of the game's positive reviews raise the exact same backtracking and pacing frustrations as the negative ones, differing mainly in whether goodwill toward VLDL was enough to tip the final verdict into a thumbs-up anyway.

A Game Best Judged by How Much the Comedy Matters to You

At NZ$34.95, reviewer sentiment on value splits almost entirely along one axis: how much the Viva La Dirt League connection matters going in. Fans who came for the references and cameo voice work broadly consider the price fair, citing a respectable eight-to-fifteen-hour campaign and treating any repetition as a worthwhile trade-off for the comedy and the chance to support the creators directly. Reviewers with little or no familiarity with the source material are far more likely to call the price steep for what amounts to a fetch-quest-heavy RPG with a fishing gimmick, and several explicitly recommend picking it up on a discount instead. A few reviewers who approached the game with no prior VLDL knowledge report walking away pleasantly surprised regardless, one describes actively disliking fishing minigames in general yet still finding this one worth finishing, but they're a minority voice against a much larger chorus warning that the humour is doing a lot of the heavy lifting that the core gameplay loop, on its own, doesn't quite sustain.

Verdict

Nice Day for Fishing is a rare case where a very large volume of reviews on both sides of the recommendation line describe essentially the same experience and simply weigh it differently. The fish-battling combat is genuinely well-built, the comedy and cameo work land well for the audience it's made for, and the pixel art is a consistent bright spot throughout. Against that sits a fetch-quest structure that reviewers overwhelmingly agree tips from intentional parody into real, wearing tedium, made worse by fast travel that arrives far too late and save-system frustrations that have cost some players real progress. If the Viva La Dirt League connection is the draw, it's an easy, charming way to spend an afternoon with familiar faces. If it isn't, reviewers suggest waiting for a sale, or skipping the fishing entirely.