A magnificent title. Well-written, engrossing, enjoyable and lovely nostalgia-inducing graphics. The fact that there is so much game and so much enjoyment here for the price of a breath is mind-boggling.

Beneath the cute facade resides an immensely frustrating game that will have you tearing your hair out with its anti-fun features.

The game structure in Cat Goes Fishing is simple: Catch fish to earn cash, upgrade rod, buy a boat to go further out to sea, catch more fish. This aspect of the game works as well as you'd expect. Not only do you need better equipment to catch bigger fish, you also need better bait. You get this by catching a small fish, then assigning it as bait rather than selling it. You use the small fish bait to then catch a medium fish which you can either sell or create new bait from in order to catch a large fish. And so on.

It's here that the game begins to reveal its rotten core. Because even though you've created bait from a small fish (which means that you're looking to catch a medium sized fish), the small swimmers can still tag onto your hook. This carries on through every level of bait: You may be on to one of the last sizes, only to have all your hard work scuppered by a midget with an appetite bigger than its own body. This wouldn't be so bad if all you lost was that particular line-cast. But you lose every increment you'd succeeded in, up to that point: You have to go all the way back to small bait to catch a medium fish and hope that a tiddler doesn't interfere again on your way through once more.

The game attempts to remedy this via a rod upgrade that prevents fish equal to the size of your bait (or less) latching-on. But you have a limited number of upgrade slots and as you progress you need some of the more positive upgrades in order to stand a chance of catching the big fish. You're asked to waste an upgrade slot on something that should be a default for the sake of the game being fun.

But common small fish spoiling your progression to rare large fish isn't the worst problem in CGF, it's not even second place in the list of annoyances! The next problem is similar but on the opposite side of the scale: Instead of catching small fish with bait intended for large fish, you also have to contend with large fish stealing your smaller bait. This is a bigger frustration because not only do you lose the bait that you've worked up to, you also don't get a fish at the end of it.

Similarly the rod upgrades are not immune to the warped idea of fair play in CGF, either. Take the big hook, which allegedly makes it easier to catch big fish. It can still be bitten by small fish and it's a one-use item: $5000 down the drain every time it happens to capture the interest of the ever-present small fish. I have absolutely no idea how it might help catch big fish because I haven't yet got one to sink past the commoners, unscathed.

There's an upgrade to supposedly help with this too: You can make your bait unappealing to certain fish so that they won't bite. Good, right? No. Say you're inundated with Mustardfish (a common medium-sized): You catch one and then apply the upgrade to repel all Mustardfish. You catch your next-sized fish and then get your bait stolen meaning you have to start again from small bait. It's at this stage you realise the only medium fish around are Mustardfish, which you now can't catch. So you remove the repellent (no refunds), catch one, use it as bait and then catch another three in a row because they're all over the place and won't let you get to the deeper areas where the big fish are. And thus completes the circle.

But the king of all stupid features and the aspect that will have you giving up sooner rather than later is the predatory fish. These fish (typically they're just the next size up from what you've caught) will bite chunks out of your successfully-hooked fish while you're reeling them in. Why's this a problem? Quest fish that you're required to catch must be fully intact to succeed in the quest. And even if you're just trying to fill the checklist, you don't get a completed entry or the full cash amount for a half-eaten fish either. You have no function to prevent this happening. Imagine you've been grinding away up towards a semi-large fish and doing your best not to get annoyed with the aforementioned mechanics. You've had to restart the process of upsizing several times and have finally managed to hook a rare and elusive swimmer. And as you're reeling it in, being careful not to over-stress your line, it happens to pass by a big red fish which bites a third out of it. This is bad enough on its own but once a predator has got a taste of your catch it'll usually then chase after it and take another bite or two. If you're lucky you might not have just a skeleton left by the time you land it, but you can say goodbye to making any quest progress. You can recast the bones as bait, and try again of course, but then you lose your hard-earned bait to a passing shark. Congratulations, you've just wasted the past 30 minutes and have absolutely nothing to show for it!

Then day turns into night and the other fish get even more aggressive leaving you struggling to even catch tiny fish. And even if you do, the sharks and other large fish are more common at night so you're more likely to lose anything you snag. There's one more thing I forgot to mention... Correct, it's another problem: The sharks -like other next-size fish- will steal your bait; except for them the game 'helpfully' informs you that you need live bait to catch a shark. So why the heck do they steal my non-live bait then? It's just one more idiotic 'feature' of CGF.
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In case I haven't been clear already (or if you just skipped to the closing words); Cat Goes Fishing is a colossal waste of your time. It feels like one of those pay-to-win games which is ridiculously unfair until you give the publisher money. But CGF doesn't have any micro-transactions; it's apparently supposed to be pure misery for the player and tries to get away with this through a moderately-pleasing aesthetic.

**UPDATE**
Since Steam asked if I want to revise my review after having played some more, I may as well add an update. Yes, I stuck at it belligerently refusing to let the game defeat me. And guess how much progress I made in doubling my play time? One quest: That's it. The quests consist entirely of "catch this fish" and I caught just one that I was intending to in 7 hours play: The rest of the time was spent contending with the games steadfast mission to make life as miserable as possible for the player.

I discovered MORE irritants too! Like how you spot a fish you've never seen before while reeling in a catch, then cast the line back to that spot merely seconds later and the fish has vanished completely. And also the Pike-like fish can teleport no matter where you move or cast the line, to ensure they'll always steal your bait and reset your progress.
I nearly said they "ruin your fun" but this game having anything resembling fun is a pipe-dream.

Sure, I unlocked more upgrades, more boats and more hats. I even managed to start exploring the deep caverns with my lure, but the fundamental issues where the game refuses to allow you to progress and sets you back to square one repeatedly, continued to baulk any progress. And there are even more stupid additions like another big hook for catching big fish: This one allegedly catches any big fish, but costs 10x the amount of the regular one and is also one-shot, meaning you lose it when a smaller fish inevitably latches-on or steals the bait.

I cannot stress enough; Cat Goes Fishing is &%$£ing awful and I am now finally done with it.