This was supposed to be a chill fishing game with Animal Crossing vibes, but then hardcore players made movement sweaty and turned it into Tony Hawk’s Underground
Webfishing is out now on Steam
The online multiplayer game Webfishing, theoretically, is about chilling with your friends and catching cute fish. But even though the casual game has only been out for a few weeks, hardworking players have already figured out how to make Webfishing sick as hell with movement tech sweats.
Webfishing's standard gameplay has a pleasant Animal Crossing sleepiness to it. You play as an adorable, customizable fisherman — a wolf with big eyes and a flannel, a black-and-white kitty taking its chances nude, etc. Then, you wander an autumnal environment catching things like seahorse and buried treasure, all while chatting with whoever is around you.
It's calming. But some players crave adrenaline, even when they're playing as a dog with its tongue out.
"Webfishing barely came out like two weeks ago, and there [are] already sweats…" one popular Twitter post said about an impressive TikTok clip (which contains flashing). "The curse of online gaming."
In the clip, a cat does 360-degree spins while soaring over orange trees. Once it lands, it ends up perfectly positioned at a picturesque pond, and then it whips out its fishing rod like it's no big deal.
Another Webfishing trickshot video (this one hauntingly soundtracked by Evanescence) shows a smiling cat with no nose doing awesome spins onto jagged rocks, and then catapulting itself across expansive stretches of land.
"'Bring Me to Life' in a trickshot video like the old times," said one person on Twitter. "Nature is healing."
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It's true — after you watch these movement tech sweats for a while, all the animal characters kind of start melting away, and you start to believe you're playing Tony Hawk's Underground in 2003. But you're not. You're seeing Webfishing players find meaning in friendship, fish, and — most importantly — looking extremely awesome.
Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.