Fisher-Diver
is a minimalistic Flash game about a character who started fishing for a living. The game has minimalistic art style to it as the player is represented as 3 circles inside each other and fish are made out of wireframes.
The game encourages to use the fishing tools as sparingly by three means: using those tools costs oxygen, the game encouraging to stay as long under water as possible due to combo gems and finally rewarding the player if the fish is more intact after being bled to death.
As the player finds guffins to improve their fishing license, they also find mysterious diary entries attached to them...
Fisher-Diver provides examples of the following tropes:
- Blackout Basement: It gets pitch-black in the third layer aside from near the player or flashlight rays.
- Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The deeper you go, the stranger and more terrifyingly enormous the creatures you encounter are. By the end, you can expect fish twice or thrice the size of your boat.
- Enemy Mine: The gigantic fish you find at the end will just as easily bite you as they will bite other fish. In fact, they will even try to bite Captain Connell. Their bites, much like your attacks, still have no effect.
- Fission Mailed: The nightmare sequence after day 1. Character slowly loses speed and eventually the fish get him.
- Harpoon Gun: The second weapon the player can buy. It's just called "Harpoon" in-game, but the way it is used suggests they're used as mounted projectiles.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: You cannot defeat Captain Connell nor can you escape him.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: What Captain Connell is eventually revealed to be doing. You're the game. And he succeeds no matter what.
- MacGuffin: Guess.
- Meaningful Name: Those that are literature-savvy may recognize the Captain's name, Connell, as the author of The Most Dangerous Game and make an educated guess on how the game will end.
- Money Multiplier: Collecting gems multiplies money earned which resets when returning to the surface.
- More Predators Than Prey: In the ocean depths, nearly every fish will try to eat you, or other fish.
- Oxygen Meter: Aside this going down by itself, it also goes down when firing a melee bolt or harpoon in order to enforce using these fishing tools sparingly.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "Showtime."
- Shout-Out: There's one to a certain short story that pretty much foreshadows the game's ending if you know what's being referenced. The Captain's name comes from the author of The Most Dangerous Game.
- Story Breadcrumbs: Most of the game's story comes from the diary entries left behind with the guffins that are drifting underneath the sea.
