Flak & Tackle

Flak & Tackle is fishing with a pistol. Edie Flint is 71, a retired clay-pigeon champion with a little boat, a lure and her old competition gun. Every cast plays out in three acts. On the way down you steer the lure past every fish in the sea: touch one and the dive is over, so how deep you get is down to you. On the way up it all flips, and you steer into everything you can until the whole shoal is hanging off your hook. Then Edie yanks the lot into the sky and you shoot it down before it splashes back. Every fish pays. The jellyfish cost you.

Spend your takings at Moira's tackle shop. Longer lines take you deeper. A chainsaw lure cuts a path through the shoal on the way down, a car battery zaps the first fish that bumps you, and lamps light up the black water at the bottom. The gun rack runs from Edie's pistol through scatterguns and a pair of buzzing machine pistols to a rotary cannon, a sky lance and bursting flak shells. There are hats too, and the best ones are earned.

Four fishing grounds wait on the chart: Wick Harbour, stuck in a thirty-year sunset; storm-lashed Gale Reach; Rimeglass under the aurora; and a whirlpool past the edge of the map. Shoot down every kind of fish in one ground to open the next. There are 69 species to log, from the humble Sprat Jack to floor bosses, fish that only come out by day, at night or around midnight, and a few secrets that only show themselves to the right diver. The whole town follows along on Gullhorn, the local social network, as Edie goes looking for the lighthouse lamp that was lost with her wife thirty years ago.

It's hand-made pixel art lit in real time. The lure's lamp is the only light in the deep, glowing fish light up their neighbours, and muzzle flashes and explosions light up the catch in the sky. Every sound and every note of the soundtrack is synthesised, and the music builds through each cast. It fills the screen on desktop and plays upright or sideways on phones: drag to steer and tap to shoot, or use the mouse and keyboard.