A downloadable Vacation for Windows and Android

Buy Now$1.99 USD or more

Get ready for the vacation of a lifetime!

Fishing Vacation features a nice calming atmosphere and plenty of fish in the lake. Reel in a big one as you discover what a true vacation is all about.

CONTROLS:

>Arrow keys for movement (Or WASD)

>X is the A button (Or Space)

>Z is the B button

>CTRL is the palette changer

While fishing, look out for silhouettes in the water, that's how you know a fish is there.

Made for the Fishing Horror Jam 2020 over the course of a month.
Tested on low grade hardware. If you encounter any bugs or game breaking glitches, please feel free to let us know. If you enjoyed the game, please leave a rating! We greatly appreciate it. Thank you for you time and fish on.

Art and Programming: Scottie Supple
Music and Sound: Julian Crowhurst
Cover art by VIDEO

DELUXE VERSION
We gave Fishing Vacation an upgrade recently for its Steam release! This version comes with a few new additional things:

-Updated endings with new art stills
-Controller support
-Additional/upgraded art and sounds in certain places
-Achievements

If you pay 1.99 you'll get this as well as a steam key for the game if you prefer.

The game jam version for windows and android will still be free! It is now listed under the DEMOS

If you enjoyed the game and are looking for more Game Boy styled horror, check out our main game in development: The Third Shift!


StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows, Android
Rating
Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars
(51 total ratings)
AuthorTeebowah Games
GenreAdventure
Made withGameMaker
Tags8-Bit, Atmospheric, Creepy, Fishing, Funny, Game Boy, Horror, Pixel Art, Story Rich
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
LinksSteam

Purchase

Buy Now$1.99 USD or more

In order to download this Vacation you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $1.99 USD. Your purchase comes with a Steam key. You will get access to the following files:

Fishing Vacation(Deluxe v1.9.9).zip 25 MB

Download demo

Download
Fishing Vacation(GameJamWindows).zip 24 MB
Download
Fishing Vacation(GameJamAndroid).apk 26 MB

Development log

Comments

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Viewing most recent comments 1 to 40 of 42 · Next page · Last page

Slight confession, but I plagiarized the story of the Steam version for my English IGCSE exams. I feel bad about it sometimes, so I just wanted to get that off my chest and apologize.

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Hahaha I hope you passed with flying colors. May you be plagiarism free from here on out 🙏 

Ooof. I accidently bought this thinking it was a retro gameboy project. Looks awesome tho!

Not sure how refunds work with itch, but feel free to get cho money back. Either way, thanks for checking it out!

Nah. It's only $2. I'll try it out on Steam instead. Thank you anyway! I just thought it was funny that it was so convincing how much it legit looked like a Gameboy project lol 

Finally got the chance to play this tonight as prep for all the spooky horror I'm going to indulge in this Halloween season! Some thoughts: I love the overall aesthetic, the Gameboy graphic combined with moments of horrifying detailed close-ups worked great. The friend's "dead fish eyes" in particular were disturbing. I thought the way the tension built each day was well done, and it managed to spook me in unexpected ways rather than the ones I expected. I'll echo others and say that I expected to get something really screwed up from the water and have it announced in the cheery "you found..." voice, although the hand popping up with the key was great, too. The fish heads disappearing from the fridge were also a nice touch!

I do have some additional thoughts on the plot. I already knew the tale of Sedna; she's not uncommon as a motif up north, though not as common as she should be, and I learned about her and saw art of her growing up. I don't want to assume anything about you or your background, and I'm saying this to offer a perspective rather than out of anger, so take this as gently as it's meant if you can. I apologize if you *are* Inuit and I'm just totally off base. But it left a bad taste in my mouth to have her legend, which is so important to a deeply oppressed culture still recovering from colonization, treated like nothing but a ghost story. Especially the way it was told piece by piece (with the assumption we don't already know it), and then hiding the story's conclusion in the basement like this big reveal to try to play her fingers being chopped off for shock value. Moreover, for her to be reduced down to a spooky water monster in a lake the way you might use something from the Cthulhu mythos just seems...wrong.

If you go to the Canadian Parliament, you can see a commemorative statue celebrating the 20th anniversary of Nunavut becoming a territory, made by the Inuit artist Bart Hanna. It's of Sedna. If you look at her, she's beautiful, smiling gently as she's surrounded by the creatures that came of her fingers and now support human life. Her demands are that you share your catches selflessly with the rest of your people and never be cruel to the animals whose lives are taken. I know people crib from dominant religions like Christianity all the time for horror, but it really discomfited me to see Inuit mythology most people still aren't familiar with being used to try to scare or disgust players, instead of just making the monster some generic thing from the deep.

(1 edit)

Hey, thanks for playing! And I totally understand where youre coming from, I'll just say that without going too much into detail, the basic jist of the story is a man interpreting his own version of sedna and his family suffers because of it. The entity in the water isnt exactly Sedna per se (you can get an idea of who it is). But with all that said, I never want to use a culture's history and stories in a disrespectful way. With my games, I try to poke fun of the way american culture takes these storys and uses them as there own. I do something like that wih The Third Shift as well.

In the end, I always am looking to do better with representation in my games and the stories they tell. And I'm always happy to discuss this with folks and open up a dialogue. If I'm doing wrong, I'd like to know,  and I never want to upset anyone with the games I create.


Thanks,

-Scottie

Hey, thank you for the thoughtful response! It does actually make me feel way better knowing that that was your intention, and it wasn't just done thoughtlessly.

I think in the future, any sort of wink and nudge that shows that the game knows what it's doing helps a lot. Even something small, like if when you first looked at the book your friend said something like, "Oh yeah, my uncle was obsessed with that thing. It's kind of embarrassing. We're not Inuit and I don't think he's ever even met an Inuit person? He was just obsessed with that one story with no other context..." That shows that the character himself is appropriating the story, rather than making it feel like the game is. I'm not sure in this case if it would fix the finger-chopping pages being hidden in the basement to ratchet up the tension or the assumption that no one playing would be Inuit or familiar with Inuit religion, but it would help a lot. And I believe you when you say that going forward you're going to continue making the effort to be mindful of how cultural stories are integrated in your work.

Just want to emphasize again that I enjoyed the game. It was creative and well-designed, and I'm definitely going to check out The Third Shift and your other work. I hope you keep making games! Thank you for listening and staying humble.

(+1)


Fifth in the line up. My first and favorite Game Boy Horror. And fishing horror. So glad I stumbled over the page ages ago.

Hi, I bought this game in a bundle some time ago, so I didn't receive a Steam key, but for some reason when I try to start the game through itch the Steam client starts and promptly tells me that I don't have the configuration for it.

So this game is unplayable for me at the moment.

(+1)

Hey Karl,

Lemme see if I can get this fixed for you here soon! Sorry for the trouble.

-Scottie 

Yes, thank you. Please do.

(+1)

Hey there Karl,
I've updated the itch version with the steam code removed, let me know if it works ok for you! Thanks!

-Scottie

Yes, working as intended now. Thanks a lot.

Got near the end (I think) where I used the last key to open the basement hatch, but interacting with it gives this error report:


___________________________________________

############################################################################################

ERROR in

action number 1

of Alarm Event for alarm 0

for object obj_cellar:

Variable <unknown_object>.steam_get_achievement(100223, -2147483648) not set before reading it.

at gml_Object_obj_cellar_Alarm_0

############################################################################################

gml_Object_obj_cellar_Alarm_0 (line -1)

ahh good find Karl, I missed that bit of steam code. Ill fix that right up, thanks for bringing that to my attention!

It should be fixed in the latest build Karl, thanks again for bringing that error to my attention. I hope your save is ok when you update.

Can this be played on the analogue pocket?

Hey there Kldolam,

Unfortunately Fishing Vacation wasnt made in GBstudio, so it isnt playable on the analogue or any emulators. Sorry about that!

(3 edits) (+1)

Saw this on Neco the Sergal's channel a while back and decided to try it myself. I love your creativity in successfully making a convincing horror experience out of a fishing game, of all things! Between this, Pylons, Third Shift, and Occult Case Files, you clearly have a gift for horror. I'm looking forward to the full releases of the last two, as well.

One very minor gripe is that there doesn't seem to be an option to actually quit the game other than alt-F4. Not really a big deal since it's a "bite-sized" game that can be finished in a single sitting, but just a little thing I noticed.

Is it possible to view achievements in the non-Steam deluxe version, though? They're popping up in-game, but I don't see any option to view them.

EDIT: Never mind, I see that they're viewable in Steam.

Hey there namonakimono!

I appreciate all your kind words, Im glad you like our brand of horror :)

For the quitting of the game, I can most definitely add a "quit game" option! I never even really thought about that haha but its something that should be in there for sure.

Thanks again, and we hope you keep enjoying our games!

-Scottie

(+1)

Really interesting, love this game!

(+1)

un juego muy interesante, la estética retro siempre ha sido mi pasión, sin duda alguna este juego es muy entretenido y con una estructura de guion muy bien traída. 

(+1)

Nice GB graphics really feels fitting in how you managed to create the horror moments, they worked so well with the low graphics. It was fun playing through to get all of the endings, nice to see that small changes really can affect how the vacation went. Though it did take me a minute to realise that while fishing I could move the screen left and right.
(+2)

This was a lot of fun. I just wish it were available in GB format so that I could put it on my emulators. Please consider it!

(+2)

really nice game. i wish you could adapt/port this to real gameboy hardware. that would be awesome.

Thank you for saying so. Honestly, I wish I could too. I do think it would be possible, I just need to pick up GBStudio sometime... anyway, thanks for playing!

(+1)

Hi ! I didn't see the download didn't have the Android version, is there a way to get the full game on android ? 

(Also, any news on a full release of the Third Shift ?)

Love your games, peace !

Hey Remy! Thanks for checking out our game. The deluxe version is windows only, but the game jam version is still android compatible. You'll find it under the demos section on this page.


The Third Shift is coming along smoothly! It shouldn't be too much longer...

Awesome ! Thanks for your answers 🙌🏻

Hello! Could you please update the Steam release of your game? It's still a version 1.7. 

Hey SobakaPeppa! I believe the update has already been pushed! I didn't make an announcement over on steam since it was all just minor grammar issues and some typo fixes. I just figured folks would get tired of my constant updates so I didn't post this time haha 

Don't worry, it's not obnoxious at all. In fact, posting as many detailed updates as possible is important to the understanding of the game's current state. You're not obligated to post updates on every single thing, but there's nothing wrong with that and I'm sure people would appreciate it.

Fair enough! If that's the case then I'll most definitely post a more detailed update log over there then. I appreciate you reaching out and quelling my fears Sobaka, thanks!

(1 edit) (+1)

My Gameplay Here! (Ending B)

Honestly, I can't say enough good things about this game. Everyone knows fishing is one of the best parts of most games (so of course the main gameplay is fun) but the HORROR in this! Everything was so beautifully paced. The slow build of dread dotted with those jolting moments of fear was just brilliant. 

And the impossible stuff we pulled out of the lake was just hilarious. 10/10 


Thank you so much for playing!!

(+1)

An enjoyably creepy romp at the lakeside cabin. If there's ever a sequel or version that's further expanded beyond the Steam upgrade, I'd love a menu with a fish "pokedex". Dig it!


Here's my no-commentary playthrough: 

(+1)

Hey thanks for playing! Glad to hear you enjoyed it :]

I put a little fish-pedia in the cabin!  It's a book on the coffee table with the dead flower on it, I apologize as it is easy to miss.

Thanks again for giving the game a go!

(+1)

Honestly since yesterday I have been searching for it and playing it (of course I sleep (-:)

(+1)

Loved the game, really cool concept and executed really well. That window scare was genuinely great and the endings weren't too hard to get. Took me about 2 hours to get all of them. Highly recommended and can't wait to try your other games

Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed

(+1)

Small bug I found. When you purposely miss the mark for all of your worms in the intro fishing part, the next day, if you try to fish, you'll get the left shoe. Then your friend's dialogue from the intro will start. Your generous friend then gives you an infinite surplus of worms for you to use after you use up the worms you got for yourself. How nice of them! You then can fish endlessly on the first day, which I guess technically makes it a regular fishing game, not that I'm complaining though. If you reload the save file, the bug should go away, just wanted to give a heads up.

Tempted to leave it in there honestly... sounds like a feature to me!

But in all seriousness, thanks for bringing this to our attention, ill be sure to fix it! Also thanks for playing our game.

(+1)

Fishing Vacation: A Gameboy styled Horror? (FULL GAME) - YouTube

Had a blast with your game, mate. Look forward to playing more of your content.

in the mobile version at the end D the cutscene bugar and the screen gets big. more game and amazing

Thank you for letting us know, we'll be sure to fix that as soon as we can!

(1 edit)

It is a enjoyable game. In fact it is really good. The one aspect I like is that the game starts really calm, laid back and chill then goes into spook zone at day 3. Although it is more annoying trying to catch fish in this game than in animal crossing where I had to cast my line in the same direction the fish was facing and be close enough to get a shot at catching it...

What I find weird is that ending B is nowhere to be found in this game. I'm thinking ending B was probably a cut ending where if you found or caught something to use against the uncle (like a baseball bat or a boxing glove with a horseshoe inside for example) you could fight back against the uncle and can choose 1 of 3 options.

Option 1: Report what tried to kill you (Ending B where you tell the police that someone tried to kill you in a cabin)

Option 2: Hide the body and leave (A variant of Ending A whereas the police leave you inform your friend that you dealt with the uncle yourself)

Option 3: KO your friend, Hide both the uncle and your friend in the cellar and enter infinite overtime (A mode that allows you to get bait and catch worms without the story ending the fun)

I don't know but considering how big that sounds (especially that last option) I can kinda see why ending B is not seen in this game.

Edit: I actually got ending B while playing. Making all the boosh I was talking about ending B nowhere to be found completely wrong. Good job gameplay. You ruined this comment.

Hey SleepyKirby, thanks for playing the game. If I recall correctly, the B ending is gotten by not having all the keys by the end of the game, its one of the more tame/bad endings. 

No problem! It's just that the fishing really hurt my hands while playing because of how much I was button mashing. I was just pressing the arrow keys, A and D like crazy! I almost got carpal tunnel when I finished the game. Also while playing the pallets did not work. Whenever I pressed CTRL the game gave me a error message and then crashed.

I'll be sure to look into that, thank you for bringing that to our attention. Ill also see about making the fishing easier, we havent heard much on that end but we're always happy to make things more accessible. Thanks again for playing!

(+1)

I have no idea how you're gonna react to this, I just really hope you'll like my take on your character. 

Loved the game and that's my way of expressing the said love!

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/The_Uncle_(Fishing_Vacation)

This is awesome! Thank you for doing this, its all very well written! (More so than the actual game haha!)

(1 edit)

Are there only 4 endings? Also, what happened to our friend in the C ending? Was he replaced by some other entity, transformed, heavily traumatised by something or the Uncle himself possessed/impersonated him?

Yes, A through D are the only endings. Perhaps the C ending can be explained if we ever make a sequel, either way I think its best left unsaid. Thanks for playing.

(2 edits)

So, did the uncle drown himself in order to unite with Sedna and was later ressurected by her, returning as a living corpse?

I will say the uncle is very much alive.

He just becomes a creature similar to Sedna?..

We'd akin him more to a delusional fanboy/henchman.

(+1)

I had a absolute blast playing this game! Ending A got me real good holy crap my heart is still pounding. The mechanics are great and I love the style of it. Thanks for making such a great game :)

hot food

(2 edits) (+2)

Great game, but what's the deal with the player's friend? He is obsessed with fishing, and I mean REALLY obsessed. This guy doesn't have other hobbies outside catching fish? lol!   

(+1)

LOVED THE GAMEBOY ART STYLE! I have a fish phobia, so there was an extra layer of fear for me! 

(+2)

I had such a blast with this!! I loved feeling like I was playing my old gameboy again. :)

(3 edits) (+1)

Great game. I really liked how the game was made especially since it made me reminisce playing on my Game Boy during my early childhood. Oh right, about the jumpscares! They're great, even though they are simplistic, it clearly shows that they really work as some of them gave me quite a scare! (An example of this is the sudden movement of the crows as they fly to god knows where. I lowkey screamed when i first saw that happen. It was funny, really.)

Overall, it was a great game and I'd like to see you make more games like this.

(+1)

Awesome game. {[may contain slight spoilers]}, i have spent a couple hours and have achieved every ending. i must say finding all the keys are very very hard. on the last day you may not get enough worms but if you know the correct spot you can get past it fine. the night fishing had me the most trouble. it is extremely difficult to catch the last fish needed as my arm now is officially sore XD. awesome game though

Made a finale


(+1)

Me and my sis took a look at this, loved the style! Got 3 of the 4(?) endings.

(+1)

Made a video


(+1)

I absolutely loved it. It has fantastic atmosphere, is terrifying, has no cheap jumpscares, has great style, lots of detail and is easily one of the best horror games i've played in a LONG time. 

Incredible game, keep making this type of stuff :)

(+2)

A lot more indepth of a game than I was expecting for a GameJam horror game, damn!

(+1)

Indepth you say? Pretty fitting for a fishing game! XD

Hi there! Great game, but I stumbled upon a bug.

-spoiler-





After getting back from fishing on the third day, instead of trying to open the cellar thanks to the third key, I tried and go out of the house by the main entrance. 
Which I did, only to end up on a black screen, no sound, nothing...

I suppose it wasn't meant to be, and I'm sad I didn't get a proper ending. :'(

If it's of any importance, I went night fishing before Day 3.
Great job otherwise, I'll try and do it over again some time, hopefully without issue. ^^'

Hey omnimos! Thanks for playing. Sorry you ran into that glitch! I didn't account for people not going into the cellar! Haha We'll be sure to fix it, thank you for bringing it to our attention! And you should be able to replay that day from your save hopefully! If not, I apologize. Thanks again!

I loved it, great work!
My favorite things about the game: the music and sounds (I loved how the radio music changes by the end); the crows!; the mythos and how the fish kept getting bigger as you fished them xD

Thanks for playing!! I'll pass along your kind words to our sound guy, they'll appreciate it! And I wonder what was causing the sudden surge in strange and large fish...hmmm.... :)

Great game!! I absolutely loved the atmosphere of the overall game and loved the aesthetics.

Question though- how are players supposed to find the keys? I've been trying it out and watching the playthrough on Youtube, but I can't seem to understand how to find the keys to the cellar...

Thank you!



-spoilers-



Most of the keys are acquired by fishing. There's one instance where a "guiding hand" well help you get one. If you're a fan of night fishing and a certain someone gets close enough, they may deem you worthy of a key. And the last one is easy! If you fish all around you'll be a SHOE in for the last key!


Hope that helps!

Found an interesting bug while trying to look for one of the endings not in a playthrough on YouTube. If you leave the cabin after unlocking the cellar hatch but before going inside, you'll be taken to a glitchy version of the cabin with segmented rooms and invisible walls. There doesn't seem to be any escape, and you just walk over the cellar hatch. I guess this can be prevented by having your friend go "Hey! We just opened this thing, there's no leaving just yet!" and stopping you.


Unless, of course, this IS one of the endings, haha.

oh wow, good find!! Haha thanks for bringing that to my attention, I'll be sure to fix that right up.


If you're looking for the "C" ending... you don't HAVE to go night fishing...

Dang, I probably should've tried that myself!


-Spoiler-


Also, during the final sequence, you can avoid your pursuer by examining an object before he captures you. He'll happily glide past you for a bit before returning, and you can slingshot him around the cabin. I used that opportunity to see if there was anything I missed in that brief chase, but couldn't find anything.

Hahaha thank you for breaking our game and letting us know! Truth be told, this kinda stuff keeps us up at night so it's so helpful to know what needs to be fixed. Thank you so much and consider it fixed!

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