Ridiculous Fishing EX is a perfect arcade remix

Vlambeers Ridiculous fishing – formerly known as Radical fishing – has already had an unlikely rebirth. The Dutch duo of arcade specialists were still running their Flash game Radical fishing in a fleshed-out version for iOS when they were overwhelmed by the launch of a successful clone on the App Store… and then another… and then another. One of them, Ninja fishing, was a great success. But Vlambeer persevered and turned the battle against clones in mobile gaming in the Wild West into one cause celebre for the indie developer community, and eventually released Ridiculous fishing in instant-classic status in 2013.

Ten years later, Ridiculous fishing needed another rescue. The game hadn’t been updated since 2017 and had compatibility issues with modern devices, but Vlambeer had broken up by 2020. What to do? Enter Apple Arcade. Apple’s mobile gaming subscription service offered Vlambeer a chance to get the band — Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, plus collaborators Zach Gage (SpellTower) and Greg Wohlwend (Threes!) – back together for one last job: reworking their mobile faithful brother in time for his 10th birthday.

The result, Ridiculous Fishing EX, belongs to that special class of remakes that play exactly like the original in your memory; it is only when you compare them side by side that you realize how far the new incarnation has progressed. Wohlwend’s signature angular art has been completely redrawn in 3D without losing any of its chunky, irreverent style. The game’s silly world of bizarro marine life and heavily armed sportfish is fleshed out via an in-universe TikTok parody. And there’s an extensive new game plus mode. But best of all, there’s a new competitive daily challenge mode – the Pro Fishing Tour – that deconstructs, rewires and remixes the game in a way that is endlessly refreshing, while underscoring the brilliant simplicity at its core.

In Ridiculous fishing, you fish, ridiculous. The game features a short, stretchy, seesaw gameplay loop that is hard to put down. Cast your line in the water, tilt your phone to dodge the swarms of fish as it crashes down and send your bait as deep as you can. When you hit a fish, go out of line or reach the bottom, the lure starts to rise – now the aim is to catch as many fish as possible on your way up. When your pull reaches the surface, the fish are flung high into the air, at which point you pull out your chosen firearm (perhaps a blunderbuss or dual Uzis) and blast them to bits before they fall back into the sea. Spend your earnings to unlock upgrades (longer line, new weapons, a valuable lure that can chew through fish on the way down, more fuel for that chainsaw, and so on). Then go again. Gradually you will progress to new locations and deeper waters, reeling in more fish with each pull.

Image: Vlambeer/Appel

Image: Vlambeer/Appel

The Pro Fishing Tour introduces preset daily challenges, organized into seasons, that increase in length and (sometimes) difficulty over the course of each week. Every day there is a different depth and varying climate effects: examples are strong currents that pull on your line, detritus that increases the speed of your hook when hit, a limited number of casts, no reloading of your guns and heavy fish that are not high to fly. Effects are also applied to certain fish: they can cause darkness when touched, be worth more when hit with the chainsaw, or turn into time bombs that can take out other fish. Finally, there are daily quests that offer additional cash rewards for certain meta goals.

Combined with two major rule changes – finite ammunition for the cannons and finite fish in the sea – these modifiers transform Ridiculous Fishing EX. Sometimes they make the game harder, sometimes they make it more fun. But they always make you rethink your tactics and re-engage with the design of a game that, on the face of it, works on a basic lizard-brain level. The seasons also have Diablo energy in the way they periodically reset all your upgrades and ask you to earn them all from scratch. There’s a new strategic angle to choosing your upgrades each time, as you react to the new parameters being set each day.

Oh, and all cash rewards have been drastically increased, so you can make millions of dollars from a single cast, rather than thousands. It’s pointless, since all upgrades also cost more, but it’s a nice bit of overkill.

Ridiculous Fishing EX‘s Pro Fishing Tour is designed around competitive leaderboards, but to be honest I’ve never looked at them. It’s enough for me to log in and find a decade-old, classic piece of game design twisted into an exciting new form every day.