Scale the Depths (PC)

In many fishing games, once you’ve reeled in your catch, you just move onto the next one. Sometimes you might be able to sell that fish or even eat it yourself, but something that doesn’t come up too often is that in reality you’d need to scale many types of fish to even have them fit to serve. Scale the Depths aims to be a fishing game with a stronger focus on that crucial step, reeling in a catch actually one of the easier parts of this short fishing adventure.

 

Interestingly enough, Scale the Depths is a game set in the near future, but even though you’re playing as a little robot with a computer for a head, most of the rest of the world isn’t quite as technologically advanced as you are. Your short-term goal across four fishing locations will always be to feed the local aquatic life and seabirds, as well as occasionally getting surprise visits from creatures of lore like mermaids and kelpies. While none of them require you to serve up fully cooked and prepared meals, you will need to scale any fish you catch if you want them to pay out well, and they have different preferences that can encourage you to experiment and find out the most profitable fish to offer. While this comprises the main gameplay loop, you will start to find notes and other clues about a shady organization called ClearWake that’s been operating in the waters you’re visiting, but while there is a sense of mystery behind their activities, Scale the Depths ends on a bit of an anti-climax. If you search well when fishing you will learn enough about what’s going on, but it does feel more like you’re only getting information rather than building up to some encounter or earth-shaking discovery that might cause you to actually interact with what felt like a group of antagonists being established.

You can focus almost solely on the fishing and scaling if you like though, and you’ll find quickly that actually reeling in fish isn’t that difficult. Once you dip your hook in the water, your line extends outward and you can guide it freely around the water. The moment the hook hits a fish, it will either catch it instantly or deal a little damage, sometimes requiring you to double back and knock it a few more times to truly capture it, but you can catch multiple fish in one cast and besides trying to swim away, you won’t see a lot of resistance from underwater life. Pufferfish will inflate to repel you briefly and you might be stunned by a jellyfish while trying to weave your hook around it, but mostly the process of catching fish is more about how you explore rather than a real fight with your quarries.

 

When the game begins you have very little line and a rather weak hook, meaning you have to settle for small prey until you have the cash to invest in upgrades. Over time you’ll be able to cast your line down deeper, hook sturdier fish with less hits, and even catch more fish in one go, and while there’s some excitement in finding new fish to hook for the main objective of feeding customers, exploration actually becomes one of the more interesting elements of Scale the Depths. Whether you’re in the Loch Ness or the swamps of North Carolina, the side-scrolling spaces beneath the water’s surface have a good deal to find beyond fish. Some are simple finds like seashells to help you purchase cosmetics or treasure chests that may contain some free gold, but there are also messages that hint at what strange finds might be in the deepest waters and artifacts that serve as interesting collectibles. Here is where you’ll get that story about ClearWake and other mysteries in the water, local legends able to provide elements to search for or stories that can foreshadow a neat find. Learning of a church near the water and then actually exploring the remains of it with your hook later is the kind of progress you can expect as you hunt around a location, there even being truly hidden spaces for a sharp eye or minor puzzles to solve like how to weigh down a switch to access another area.

 

Funnily enough, the fish can start to feel like a secondary aspect if you are angling for collectibles or opening up paths to the legendary catches. You can get repellent to keep smaller fish away and there are special bait types that are truly just helpful items like strengthening your hook to break barrels or activating an arrow to help you locate goodies. Still, the emphasis on discovery is one reason the game does feel like it reaches an anti-climax, a good deal of what you seem to be working towards ultimately more about filling out a collection than confronting the conspiracy you’re learning about. The four different locations at least all feel materially different before you even consider the real world species you’ll be pulling in on your line, the biomes and extra aesthetic touches like that sunken church making each locale more than just the latest fishing hole.

Once you’ve pulled in your catches though, it’s time to scale them if you want to sell them to the hungry wildlife. Dragging the scaling knife across the fish, you need to make sure you don’t move too quickly or sloppily or you risk cutting the meat. You’ll need to chop off the heads and fins as well which is more of an appropriate touch rather than anything with any real challenge, but figuring out how careful you need to be when scaling does lead to some unfortunate nicks on otherwise fine fish during the learning process. It will eventually become second nature though, even when fish that take more time to scale or have odd body shapes appear, but upgrading your knife means simpler fish can be done in almost an instant so scaling everything you reel in isn’t too repetitive. Eventually you’ll see new complications like parasites you need to slice off carefully or barnacles that you must whack hard with your knife to break off, and these two can start off a bit touchy until you have the feel how to do it and no longer need to worry much about any accidental damage. The scaling never quite gets complicated or challenging truly, and while there is some wow factor to eventually setting down huge whoppers or legendary catches on your cutting board, its more like the scaling process is to add some texture to fishing rather than something meant to put up a fight.

 

This does lead to a bit of a strange truth about Scale the Depths. The fishing isn’t that challenging, often more a matter of managing how much line you have, and you can always dip the hook right in immediately after and try again if you didn’t snag what you were angling for. The scaling after is neat conceptually but not that demanding, and while pleasing your customers earns higher payouts, you can just throw whatever you have at them too and move the line along. Upgrades do give you reason to play a bit better of course, but each location also sets you back a bit, your rod, hook, and knife weaker when you get there and needing to be built back up. It is reasonable the game doesn’t want you to explore too much when first arriving and working your way up from common knives to more unusual fare like katanas and kris daggers adds some visual flair to what could have just been efficacy upgrades, but it can still feel like you’re spending time doing simpler fare when you want to do the more fascinating exploration. There could be room for every piece of the experience to appeal in its own way, but it feels like the balance of interest will favor navigating your hook for reasons beyond fishing while other parts of the process get in the way or end up a bit too simple to hold their charms.

THE VERDICT: There is simple fun to be found in Scale the Depths, the main loop of catching fish, scaling them, and serving them able to provide neat little surprises thanks to the nice pixel art and ease of play. Exploring the four fishing holes gives you something with more variety to it than the main systems though, looking around for collectibles and uncovering secret passages often more rewarding than actually reeling in your catches. Nature and folklore trivia provides some nice payoff to looking around and collecting everything you can, but the main story thread doesn’t seem to reach much of a conclusion, a lot of Scale the Depths’s ideas working just well enough but not having the substance to make it an adventure with a lot of depth.

 

And so, I give Scale the Depths for PC…

An OKAY rating. While the four fishing holes do have enough to them to make gradually worming your line through them an interesting process, the lack of a big finale and the simple processes needed to get through the game do leave Scale the Depths feeling like it reached a premature end. It took me around 9 hours to do nearly everything and collecting certain things were more a drag than a worthy pursuit since a rare fish or two can just not be there sometimes making your hunts feel fruitless, but even going through the game at a regular pace can go by rather quickly. The customers, while cute and providing some more nature or folklore trivia, don’t feel like an overly important part of the experience since catering to them isn’t too hard or necessary, and scaling can be too quickly accustomed to. There’s still some thrill to preparing a particularly large fish or an unusual one, and it can be more of a meditative process rather than one that feels like a load-bearing piece of the game’s formula. With even snagging new fish usually not too much work though, most parts of Scale the Depths start to feel a little too brisk and easy, a lot of effort certainly put into the look of everything you’re doing but not as much into making things that engaging. It’s not necessarily a bad formula and the wiggle room might be there to ensure even casual players can make good progress rather than having to be too delicate or careful, but the systems feel like they needed to evolve more than they do. Scaling eventually introducing new complications like barnacles was a right step and the fishing itself remains an interesting element because the underwater spaces have a good deal to discover and toy with, but Scale the Depths stops evolving its systems a bit too early so you end up having a less fulfilling experience.

 

The creators behind Scale the Depths and even some of its fans seem quick to defend the game’s scaling concept against a wave of mobile imitators that arose after it was unveiled, and this may have lead to this fishing game hitting the market before it had time to be fully fleshed out conceptually. Not wanting to be forgotten as copycats earned attention, Scale the Depths’s development team might have felt they didn’t have the time to more deeply consider how to make everything work or add the breadth of content they’d like. Perhaps this is why it has four fishing holes that only take a while to explore to reach the oddly subdued ending, and maybe one day post-release patches could make it into what it should have been from the start. At present, it is still a fishing game with some nifty ideas that can sustain its unless you want to scour every inch for the full collections of fish and artifacts, but some unfortunate realities of the gaming market may have lead to Scale the Depths being served up before it was fully prepared.