Anglerfish review — Bloody buzzkill

Prepped and ready for a night out on the town with your work buddies, you don your schoolgirl uniform. Standing underneath the buzzing neon sign outside the Anglerfish bar, you anticipate a night of debauchery and booze-addled antics, but what lurks underneath the seedy nightclub has a different definition of desire. Sure you might be able to hold your liquor, but can you hold on to your life?

On a surface level, Anglerfish is a surreal horror adventure where you need to navigate the strange complex beneath a bar in order to escape. You aren’t helpless though, as you’ll quickly find a shotgun to defend yourself against the monsters lurking in the dark. And trust me you’ll need it, as the foes are plentiful and dangerous, being able to instantly kill you upon contact. So what’s the penalty for dying you might be wondering? You’ll need to restart from the very beginning.

Anglerfish is a game about failing and trying again. The game even comes right out and tells you this, as saving only takes place when you die. While this is a novel concept the first few times you die, it can quickly become a hindrance to the overall experience. Sure it’s fun to see small changes each time you delve back into the underbelly of the bar, but is it still fun after you’ve died to a cheap trick ten times? How about twenty, or thirty? Is dying to an enemy in one hit and having to retread all your steps back to where you died still fun after the fortieth time? For some it might be, and this is really where the great divide is going to be for players.

Throughout the few hours it took me to complete the game, this certainly was a drag. Although during my second playthrough, I had become more accustomed to this, and after learning the layout of the Anglerfish it was easier not to die in trivial ways. I actually found myself enjoying the game at this point because I wasn’t having to do so much tedious backtracking, but does that invalidate the frustration I experienced during the entirety of my first playthrough? I’m not so sure, and I can easily see this turning off a lot of people right away, and I wouldn’t blame them. You can unlock shortcuts to make backtracking less painful, and the route to the finish line is admittedly not very long, but getting to the point where you’re gelling with the gameplay loop can be a bitter pill to swallow.

One way Anglerfish tries to spice up its gameplay is through the bartender, who serves various drinks and concoctions that act as power-ups to alter your run. I really wanted to like this system, but I ended up just ignoring it for the most part, as many of the drinks on offer either end up making the game more frustrating and difficult or are little more than a novelty. Beverages like Hermes will increase the speed of enemies, or Devil’s Tango makes the skeletons in the environment smile at you when walking by. You’ll be visiting the bartender nearly every time you die, so it’s a shame this system wasn’t more involved.

As for the narrative, there are dregs of a deeper story here that unfortunately never coalesce into something that felt that meaningful. It’s hard to stay invested when the scraps of the underlying narrative are constantly being buried under pointless deaths and bland backtracking through dark corridors. The vibes and environments certainly nail the feeling of surreal horror, but it can be difficult to fully appreciate it when you just want to breeze past it to get back to where you were before you died. I did appreciate the macabre humor and dedication to making this game stand out among the sea of indie horror, but it just never felt strong enough to overcome the stiff gameplay. Sure if you squint hard enough you can find more than just a strange man escaping a bar full of vampires, but to me, the juice just wasn’t really worth the squeeze. 

Unless otherwise stated, the product in this article was provided for review purposes.