Fish For Spooky Booty In Trawl

If you take your fishing boat out to sea on a stormy night and follow ghostly signals on your radio, you shouldn't be surprised if your trawl net hauls up something a little eerie.

Trawl [official site] is a charming curio, a game about working a trawler that seems doomed to never catch fish but does pretty well with oddities. I've hauled up a straight razor, harmonica, handcuffs, and other oddities. It's a pleasant and moody little game, made by Prowl duo House of Wire, and is out now for your plundering pleasure.

Manning the trawling is pleasingly mechanical. Click and drag to yank a lever extending the arm the trawl net hangs from. Yank on a winch lever to send it down. Head on over to cabin and crank the clonking throttle to get moving and turn the wheel to head for those mysterious radio signals. Once the clanging bells signals you've found something, winch it up, swing the arm over, and empty the net. It's very satisfying, embedded in a soundscape of rain, water, and machinery.

As for what you find, well, that's a bit weird and random. Your radio burns out after three finds, and sometimes your haul will seem to tell a story - or not. Either way, you can arrange your finds in your boat's cabin, and write a little report on your typewriter to pop in a bottle and toss into the ocean. Pleasant.

Trawl is $5 from Itch for Windows, Mac, and Linux.