Grove Fisher

You inherit a pond, apparently underground, and you start fishing it. Grove Fisher, from EVIL CORP GAMES, the same studio behind the best duck clicker, arrived in December 2024 as a relaxing idle about discovering fish, mutating them, and unearthing the treasures somebody buried under your ponds. It is a gentle game about an unreasonable fishery.

What the loop feels like

You click to reel in the early catches, cash builds, and the cash buys pond upgrades, skill-tree nodes and new varieties of subterranean life. Rare fish can be mutated to multiply profits, and old treasures come up on the line often enough to feel like archaeology rather than fishing. A prestige mechanic resets the operation in exchange for a valuable resource, and the next cycle runs faster. That's Grove Fisher.

You unlock a deeper pond layer and spend an idle evening discovering what lives in it. You catch a fish you have never seen before, mutate it, and the economy visibly shifts gear. That's Grove Fisher.

The systems doing the work

The skill tree is the spine of the game: abilities, pond upgrades and unlock features hang off it, and prestige cycles feed back into it. Discovery is the real hook, dozens of species and treasures, each one a small marker of progress in a game that otherwise keeps its systems deliberately simple. Community consensus puts a focused completion of the achievement list at around twenty hours, which is a fair size for a game this gentle.

Where it stumbles

The quirks matter if you are planning around them. The game does not generate progress while closed, so true idling means leaving it running, an odd omission in a genre defined by offline earnings. And there is no clean way to reset progress once the achievements are done, which caps replay value: this is a single-playthrough game, and the community says so plainly. The opening stretch also takes a while to roll before the prestige cycles smooth it out.

Playing it today

It is on Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux, published by EVIL CORP GAMES, with Steam Cloud and achievements. Our platform checks found no mobile release, so the pond stays on your desktop.

The verdict

A pleasant, modest idle with real charm in its discovery loop, held back by the no-offline-progress quirk. Play it in the background with the game actually running, and it delivers exactly the relaxing fishery it advertises.