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 71 days
Peak 210 · Low 21
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.
Welcome back to another Fall Update! Today, we are joined by 325 other games in an event all about incrementals! Black Hole Fishing will be 30% off until October 22nd.An event about incrementalsTo celebrate the occasion, I've released a few extra changes and fixes. This builds on the previous major update, and includes a couple of regression fixes as well.A few more visual upgradesOur artist originally designed the Hatchery to have some fun little lines connecting each fish to its information column. This is one of the many small tasks that didn’t make it into the game on launch day, and then sat on the backlog for way too long. Thankfully, my stack of artist notes is almost gone now, and I think the hatchery looks lovely with its new styling. The little info toggle (i) shows this extra detail, so you can hide it if you prefer.We also added a few extra little pieces to the Lab, including some bubble effects and better animation.Finishing the CodexLast week, I announced an overhaul of the Trait Codex and fish cards, but two currencies were conspicuously missing. We now show all available information on the cards so you don't have to guess. If you want to make the most optimized fish for Lab scanning or the LHC, or try to make the most valuable fish for the Autumn biome, you can do all of that now without frustration. Don't worry, there are still plenty of things to discover and learn.Mechanical changesThe fish scanner's time is now based on the fish's spawn time rather than a hidden value. In general, this makes scanning faster in the early game.Steam Deck support was broken in the last update. Unfortunately, my new Steam Deck had a bad fan, so I was waiting for a replacement last week. I have a Deck again, and I've verified that the game works 100% with the touchscreen. I also started working on controller support. It's not perfect, but we have a virtual cursor that you can control with the joystick. I'm working on 100% controller support, so please send feedback if...
Fall update: Fish IQ, and the Codex, Too!Hey, friends! Welcome back to another Black Hole Fishing update! I've been releasing some smaller stealth updates over the past few months, but it's finally time to pull all those changes together and throw a big party! If you haven't played in a while (or still have the game on your wishlist), then now's a great time to jump (back) in!Now with smarter fish:Let's start with the headliner feature: Fish are smart, and they now come with little icons! These icons come with tool-tips that describe the fish's behavior at a glance. This fish scares others away, this fish swims in schools, etc. This gives you much more power when choosing your fish - pick the best combination of traits, behaviors, and boosts to maximize profits!And better trait details:The codex now shows way more details about each fish and trait. If you're looking to optimize, you can now easily compare stat multipliers, science values, or synergy boosts. We also have mass ranges now, so you can see the smallest and biggest fish you caught. (This also means mass is the one value you don't know up-front, so go catch a whopper if you want to see how big a Bass can get!)Finally, I cleaned up the UI, so there are some pretty colors on the cards :)Speaking of UI:I also did a fair bit of clean-up in multiple game scenes. There was a bunch of leftover polish work after launch, and this update contains the majority of it! I won't go through the whole list, but keep an eye out for some fancy looking bits and bobs (like a color bomb bar that actually sparkles).I also did a localization pass, so we shouldn't have any language overruns any more. If you see something, say something, but I believe I got them all.Finally, safety.We unfortunately have had a few issues regarding save games. I patched the autosave system, and haven't heard any new reports of lost (corrupted) saves in a while. But, I would occasionally get a sad bit of feedback from a player who forgot to put their ...
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.
Posts come from Steam's official announcements feed.
