If you were too relaxed playing Webfishing, you might like this fishing roguelike shooter where your catches can mercilessly gun you down

Lake of Creatures - Release Trailer - YouTube Lake of Creatures - Release Trailer - YouTube
Watch On

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.

(Image credit: Antenna Games)

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.

Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

Read more
Cruel
Cruel is a frantic run-and-gun shooter where you boot cultists out of windows in a cursed apartment block that wants you dead
A Lovecraftian monster in a dungeon in Cyclopean: The Great Abyss.
This fascinating Lovecraftian RPG has me determined to build an army of ghoul-slaying cats—and no I haven't been driven mad by forbidden knowledge, why do you ask?
Wormhole
Wormhole is an impeccable arcade revival of Snake that plays like it fell off the back of Derek Yu's van
A series of large explosions in Bio Prototype.
This bizarre roguelike has a new take on the Vampire Survivors formula: letting you build your own custom weapons out of brains, eyeballs, and chimpanzee spines
A man turns away from an open window while monsters gather in the dark
Look Outside is a survival horror RPG where you absolutely should not look outside
A monster made of glowing skulls has a brinrevolver aimed at it in Abyssus.
Wield a brinerevolver as a brinehunter in Abyssus, the briniest ‘brinepunk’ shooter this side of the Mariana Trench
Latest in Roguelike
A convoy of strange beings proceed across a desert in Caves of Qud key art.
After 17 years, devs of the only roguelike where players ask 'the best way to get the most limbs' can't believe its success: 'More people have bought Caves of Qud than are in this stadium, how do you reckon with that?'
A True Kin knight stands in a ruin in Caves of Qud, flanked by bloodstained furniture and a freshly mortalized corpse.
Despite making a roguelike where you can have countless arms and legs, Caves of Qud's creators say the ideal form is a limbless sphere: 'We started in perfection and only moved farther from God'
The jester from Balatro, portrayed in unsettling detail in real life, wears an uncanny smile and stares at the viewer.
PC Gamer vindicated by Swen Vincke: Larian boss calls Balatro his personal GOTY as it sweeps top prize from devs at GDC awards
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
Balatro's first demo could be edited with Notepad to unlock the whole game—the solution? 'Bury it as soon as possible' with a 'newer, shinier version'
A busy marketplace in The Bazaar.
The Bazaar could be the future of autobattlers, if it stops strangling itself to death with its own microtransactions
A vampire with a dark castle and swarms of bats in the background.
We need to decide on a genre name for Vampire Survivors-like games before a really terrible one sticks
Latest in News
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event
A Viera looking confused in Final Fantasy 14.
Old armor continues to fall victim to Final Fantasy 14's bizarre two-channel dye system, unless you're super into changing the colour of teeny-tiny eyelets: 'Why even bother at this point?'
Starfield: Shattered Space
By the time Bethesda was on Starfield, you'd 'basically get in trouble' for breaking schedule, says former dev: 'A lot of the great stuff within Skyrim came from having the freedom to do what you want'