The Haunted Hoard: Anglerfish (PS5)
When you start the horror game Anglerfish, you’ll receive an ominous question. Your playthrough is about to be influenced by a key decision, one that will change key moments in ways you likely cannot predict. When you start Anglerfish, you must make the choice… of which of three donuts to pick. Shortly after, you’ll be asked which fictional Let’s Player will voice your entirely silent protagonist, and that’s after you already selected him from a “character select” that has no one but him to select.
Even before you’ve really seen a smidgen of the kinds of horror Anglerfish contains, you’ll have already seen one of its greatest tools for being an interesting adventure: its comedy. However, to call it a comedic horror game doesn’t quite explain the kind of game you’re entering. Anglerfish is a horror game with dark and disturbing imagery, moments of peril, and a narrative you’ll have to read between the lines to uncover. At the same time, the game will happily subvert your expectations, play with its video game format, and keep you on your toes as you can’t be quite sure if something is dangerous or a set-up to a punchline. A monster that legitimately threatens your life can’t be underestimated, even if maybe when it attacks it was revealed to have been a dud all along. Another time though, that creature will tear your head off like the fiend it appears to be. But then things can get even crazier, because you might actually die, but then on the death screen, the enemy goes off-screen, comes back with a wedding proposal, and you get to witness the happy life your headless corpse and the withered vampire lived together.
Anglerfish’s mix of silliness and horror starts when the game’s main character sets out for a bachelor party where he and a few friends from work have all dressed up like masked school girls save for the group’s wet blanket. Showing up at the Anglerfish bar for a night of debauchery, it’s not long before it’s revealed the ladies at the club are actually vampires who will tear your head of your shoulders should they get their claws on you. If you do die though, you’ll be right back outside the Anglerfish, unable to leave and forced to plunge back in where something is bound to have changed since last time. This can be something that endangers you, like a hoard of vampires you can barely repel with the shotgun that serves as your main fighting tool, or the bartender might twist into a boss fight. Other times though, you’ll see much weirder and funnier things like the path forward lined with skeletons holding cheery and supportive signs. You might not even find yourself in the bar at times despite going through the doors, but whether its somewhere meaningful to the actual emotional issues of the protagonist like an ice cream shop from his past or a game of Pac-Man, you can never quite be sure.
However, while there is plenty of absurdity to be found, your main quest will involve plunging deeper into the basement of Anglerfish, a subterranean space filled with more lethal dangers and some well-realized pixel art horror. There will be stretches where you bumble around in the dark, anxiously listening for the telltale sound of a creature sprinting at you on all fours, your shotgun’s slow firing too limiting to just fire and hope you hit it before it hits you. You might walk into a bathroom and a fleshy creature sits up, a long tendril coming towards you as you can only barely make it out in time. You’ll have to flee through an office space reflecting your past from a beast that crushes everything it touches as it is hot on your heels. Anglerfish can be eerie, it can whip up some effective bloody gore, and while the kooky subversions add constant fun surprises that make each death more interesting since it basically comes with a potential prize, you can start piecing together a subtle but effective narrative about the main character as well as a more metatextual one involving the game’s structure.
Anglerfish also gets to get away with its silly diversions by having a good mix of actual gameplay and puzzle solving as you progress through the basement. Moments where you need to move fast to survive are balanced out by rooms where some gimmick must be figured out to safely traverse. A room full of bridges over acid where the floor turns invisible takes some figuring out to overcome despite involving rubber duckies. Enemies might essentially make a maze of a space because they can’t be killed but must be passed by somehow. Little moments of experimentation can sometimes be a little frustrating if you’re not picking up on the specific logic at play but your options are usually fairly limited to that shotgun and moving around. There is tension in testing your theories, but there are definitely moments where the game almost forces a death on you that could have been bothersome too if the game wasn’t smart about how it designs the basement. Many sections that involve quick action or figuring out a puzzle will unlock a shortcut after they’re completed or might even be completely skipped on the next revive to keep up the game’s pace, and while hearing other characters get a bit snippy or sarcastic about the specific circumstances of your death can make the challenging moments sting more, they can also provide a good bit of levity when the joke lands instead. Anglerfish will start funneling you past repeated content on deaths to avoid too much repetition in a game that often thrives on the newness of the strange subversions you’ll find, something fortunate because Anglerfish essentially wants you to play through it three times.
If you do play Anglerfish through once, you can still get a satisfying experience with pretty much all the pieces you’d like. There’s enough of the more serious story to uncover to have a general sense of what’s being told, with the two follow-up efforts filling in the details that make it clearer without ever going too far in laying it all out. Anglerfish has more than enough of its surprise content that it saves for repeat playthroughs to add some interesting substance, the general steps of the horror action and puzzles usually still in place but much easier to handle after you’ve gotten used to them or can immediately input a puzzle’s solution. Then again, the subsequent playthroughs will prey on the expected, throwing you off in ways that of course can elicit some laughs but can have a surprisingly meaningful touch to them at times too. There are technically things that might make you attempt a fourth playthrough or more such as an underwhelming secret ending or the more interesting step into areas from one of the developer’s other titles. There is definitely reason enough to see it through the three times at least, one for each donut as you might have surmised, but it won’t quite stave off some of the toll of quick deaths or the repeated sections, especially when you’ve been trained to sometimes expect something truly outlandish only to not spot variation in points where it would have really benefited from breaking away from what you’ve done before. It’s little surprise the game name checks the similarly silly Frog Fractions which is well known for its absurdist humor being the main draw over the basically negligible gameplay, but Anglerfish wanting to have its horror and action too sometimes impedes its dadaist tendencies so it’s not quite giving the delights or dangers its full attention.
THE VERDICT: Anglerfish can do good horror and uses it death system for moments where you are afraid to die even though you know you’ll come back to something potentially interesting after. The comedy gives Anglerfish an exciting and hilarious extra layer that often outshines the quality work that would have made its character-focused story and moments of danger effective on their own. As fun as seeing all the wacky subversions and breaks away from standard play can be though, Anglerfish can start to test your patience during its tougher sections despite decent shortcuts. It’s not enough to deter you from doing three playthroughs to see the wide variety of things the game holds, but the repeated moments do take their toll since they’ll keep you from the game’s more captivating new elements.
And so, I give Anglerfish for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. The main draw of Anglerfish will definitely be the strange and unexpected paths it ventures down to disrupt the horror gameplay, and it does deliver well on constantly inventing new ways to keep you guessing both in potential comedy or in how you might find yourself dying next. I’ve only really shared the tip of the iceberg for the kinds of crazy things you’ll see in the game, but it’s not so lost in the weirdness that it threatens to overexpose you to it all. The game might ask you specifically if you want a surprise next time when you enter the Anglerfish, bracing you for more of its humorous absurdity, and pull the rug out from under you as you realize you really can’t get a full read on the kinds of tricks it will pull. Horror surprises thrown into the mix add some twists with extra substance too, because while the mystery of why there are vampires at the Anglerfish isn’t as interesting of a story as the unspoken issues of the protagonist that are conveyed in smaller pieces, you will still have to treat the game as one with threats to overcome and tasks to be completed rather than it being a guided tour of a bunch of jokes. You won’t go too long without the potential for something goofy but also can have moments where the horror breathes, but the action is still what feels like the part that makes the experience a little rougher. Even when the game starts shoving you forward a little harder with help like temporary invincibility or a stronger shotgun, there are points in the adventure where you might encounter a legitimately tough challenge that leads to many deaths and little forward progress to what will be a new batch of surprises. The repeat playthroughs are still worth it despite it meaning you’ll run into some of those rougher sections again, but Anglerfish doesn’t like to linger either and tries to speed things up without ever really shoving you along and saying you just couldn’t cut it. There could have been a few more bits of leniency still, tougher moments didn’t always need to throw you back to the front door and there are some less interesting obstacles you can die to that aren’t really ever funny or tense that could have been adjusted.
Anglerfish isn’t really a time loop game despite sometimes being called one, its deaths closer to classic video games where you repeat a section you just attempted after failing. However, Anglerfish also knows to shake up that experience so trying to push your way through won’t be just hitting the same beats, and it even exploits the fact you are expecting the same thing to move away from that to fun effect. It can’t quite cure the fact sometimes it will be plain repetition because of how instantaneous some deaths are and its bag of tricks not being deployed to the point that every new surprise is a showstopper. It is still a game that constantly stokes curiosity and dishes out entertaining comedic subversions, all while still showing it could have been a standard horror game if it hadn’t wanted to also bring the laughs. It’s a game that can provide surprises that startle or delight without it ending up an overly unserious mess, Anglerfish’s strange identity making it a nice shake-up for horror fans or a good twist for people looking for a new flavor of video game humor.