Black Hole Fishing tasks you with catching fish, selectively breeding them to enhance their traits, and feeding them into a black hole singularity for incremental gains. The game leans heavily on absurdist humor and narrative progression as you work through its layers of mechanics. It's best suited for players who enjoy incremental games with a comedic voice, though note that late-game content has balancing and performance issues that some find tedious.
About this game
Black Hole Fishing is an absurd incremental game about catching, breeding, and perfecting SO MANY fish. Catch a fish, optimize its traits, then stock your pond with it as you pour fish and science into an endless singularity!
Players, last 30 days
Peak 210 · Low 18
Daily peak concurrent players, sampled once a night from Steam.
What players are saying
▼ Not recommended29 hrs
I did not enjoy my time. A good portion of the mechanics/areas in this are not actually meaningful and are best ignored, and it does feel like progress is slowed by throwing irrelevant things in front of the player and hoping they don't figure it out. The late game is then a process of simply twiddling your thumbs and waiting hours to accumulate a certain amount of mass because the dev has weight caps for fish that you can't improve on. The ending, as well, is a simple "The end" and nothing more.
I can't in good faith recommend this game at the moment. The early game was interesting enough and the writing is good, but around the lategame things just fall apart really badly. There are performance issues, questionable balancing choices, and a lot of bugs that ruin the experience. (On the initial release your money could easily overflow into the negatives, preventing you from buying anything.)
The dev is active, so maybe these will get fixed in the future. Until that happens though, I'd recommend keeping your distance.
This game starts of quite nice, with unique ideas but it falls flat executing them.
After a while it gets obvious that the most efficient way to play this game is to ignore most system and just reset every 1-5 minutes, until you got all meta progression items. The way you get meta progression currency is for the most game gated by accumulating mass in your black hole. At set breakpoints you get some currency.
Game is balanced in a way where the fastest way by far is doing very short runs, since grinding to the next breakpoint is not worth it in terms of efficiency. Like not worth at all, short resets are 10 times better if not more. So 80% of the game is doing short reset runs, which at some point take 1 minute and consist of you doing the same few clicks. All to grind up buy everything and enter late game.
Late game is fun for like an hour, until you interacted with the systems and realize how flat and basic they actually are. You quickly reach the point where you have more money than you can spend and nothing to spend it on and are just bottlenecked.
Grind to the end is having the game run idle for about 2 hours and then you can click a button to end the game.
All in all it is just a bad incremental game and needs some serious rebalancing of the progression curve. Right now it is boring and simply too expensive for around 9h of content, which consists of short resets mostly.
Changelog: There were a lot of small changes in this one, but here are the highlights: 1. Performance is increased. I see a 2X framerate improvement on my computer, but ymmv. 2. We added 3 save slots and gave the save system one more look-over. Auto-saves are easier to access now, some players were getting confused and a couple overwrote a save file on accident. This should be much harder to do now. 3. There was a bug where the magazine disappeared on prestige under certain circumstances. 4. I looked through the backlog and fixed as many bugs as possible. So if you still see anything, let me know. Otherwise, let's assume that the game is bug free 😆 Notes: I've been slowly working on some new features, but the churn was getting pretty big, so I wanted to get the performance patch out first. The next update should be much smaller (in terms of code changes), but more impactful on actual gameplay.
Summer Update - What's new, and what's next?Hey, friends! I just wanted to share an update on Black Hole Fishing. It's been a little while (I got to learn about burnout 🙃), but I'm back and updating again. Here's what's new, and what's still coming:Do you hear that?Right before the game launched, Peter from BerryNote () reached out and offered to make us a custom, dynamic soundtrack for the game. He came through just in time, but I was swamped with launch day bugs and wasn't able to get things integrated right away. Well, the wait is over - the OST is in. This one features a lot more ambience and nature sounds, which works well compared to a more traditional set of songs. In case you prefer the original, there is a toggle in the settings menu to switch back and forth.Happy summer! Is it too late for spring cleaning?One other "launch day leftover" was the large pile of minor tweaks and fixes that didn't make it in the game right away. Our artist had given me more than 40 tasks to clean up - visual artifacts, UI weirdness, etc. I finally got started on this list, so the visual quality is a little better, and will continue to improve as we go.I also squashed a fair number of bugs, including a major one affecting auto-saves. In short, the game could get into a state where the backup auto-saves stopped working. This doesn't matter for 99% of players, but of course, when it matters (something happens to the main save), it matters a lot!Also fixed: fish lab cost displays were weird; using a color bomb was changing the visual size of the fish.Re-spec time!Finally, I added a small change to the Prestige screen. The "undo all" button now allows you to refund your spent gluons, meaning you can re-spec and try different upgrades. This is a part of a larger ongoing overhaul of the prestige screen. I want to reduce the need for rapid prestige spam. It's not the intended way to play, and most of the negative feedback I get comes from people who grind out gluons as fast as possible...
Changelog: Added FPS Limiter Added Bleach achievement to prevent confusion for new players (code is added, I will set up the actual achievement soon) Added more story beats on compression events Added 2 new animations for prestige and game won Fixed achievement triggering early Ensured that windowed mode always shows the window border Added custom fish names (and fixed hatchery name replication). Notes: This patch contains the first real additions to the game since launch, along with a few bug-fixes. This mostly appeared in the tutorial/story text and related animations. The ending is a little better, but I'm still playing with a few final elements. I have a small story beat planned at the ending isn't really foreshadowed, so I'm adding a few more small bits of text throughout the game to support it. I am close to done with the OST integration as well. Once these smaller changes are in, I'm going to start focusing more on the first major update. This will take some time (probably a month or two), so if you are interested in being involved, consider hopping on the Discord server for more frequent updates. I'm always looking for players who want to try out new builds before they go live. https://discord.gg/4S3mfzNenY TL:DR - If you enjoyed the game and are waiting for a big update before playing again, this isn't it. I'm working on something a bit more substantial that will be worth coming back to. If you're looking for an excuse to play the game again, there are a few new bits of text and animations to discover, but no major mechanical changes.
Posts come from Steam's official announcements feed.
