Lake of Creatures is out today.
I’ve been enjoying Webfishing a great deal, recently—a chill, tidy little multiplayer fishing game where you can customise your pixelated cat (or dog). But I couldn’t help but wonder, as I had insightful conversations with strangers by the river, whether the experience would be improved if the catches could shoot bullets at me out of their eyeballs. The answer is: Sorta.
Lake of Creatures is a new roguelike from solo developer Antenna Games, and having messed around for a bit, I can safely say it’s a solid romp. Like a can of tuna, it does what it says on the tin—you swoop around a set of lakes filled with mutant fish and alternate between gunning them down and trying to catch them.
It’s a neat enough concept that plays nicely in execution, too. While the gunplay’s pretty standard, the fishing mechanic is a novel layer on top of your standard top-down run ‘n’ gunning. In order to extend your casting line, you have to swing it around a bit, then click to stop the bobber mid-swing to land it in the water. This operates a little like having a flail with a button that freezes its head in midair. So a fish can bite it. I’ve lost control of this metaphor.
Fish will appear after you’ve cleared a room of combatants, and sometimes there’ll be multiple—which turns fishing into a cute combat challenge of its own, as the remaining fish’ll often try to mercilessly gun you down. Actually catching them involves a timing-based minigame where you need to click at the right moment to deal critical damage, though a whiffed reel still hurts them slightly.
Otherwise, you have a gun, an armoury of weapons you can pick up, and a bunch of Binding of Isaac-style upgrades that’ll give you stuff like boosts to your boat speed, poison bullets, and a floating trident to stab your enemies. There’s also a melee attack, which unfortunately highlights the rough spots in Lake of Creatures.
It’s entirely possible that this is a skill issue on my part, but the game is appropriately, well, floaty. While your boat can get faster with upgrades and the like, it also steers like it’s going through molasses, which can be pretty frustrating in a bullet hell. While this gives it the game charm, it doesn’t quite click with the roguelike elements, wherein taking even a single heart of damage puts you in trouble. Often I’d cut a fish down with my machete (as you do) and send my boat careening right into a bullet, fired by my opponent nanoseconds before.
I also noticed some weird framerate slowdowns which, considering this is a pixel-art game and I don’t have an awful PC, is concerning. I went into the options to check if I simply hadn’t uncapped the framerate (I once nearly melted a new PC without doing this on Moonlighter, as it proceeded to try and run it at 400 frames per second) but I couldn’t find a setting.
Given this is the solo dev’s first commercial venture, though, I’m happy to chalk it up to something that’ll be fixed down the line. If you’re itching for a bit of cheap roguelike fun with a novel concept strapped to the side, you could do far worse than Lake of Creatures. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got mutant tuna to slay.
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