So, how best to describe Nice Day for Fishing? I guess I have to start with Viva La Dirt League, a sketch comedy YouTube channel that has gotten a lot of mileage out of the quirks, follies, and headscratchers in video games. One of their more popular series, “Epic NPC Man,” is about a fantasy MMORPG, largely from the perspective of the game’s NPCs.

Nice Day for Fishing is set in that game world, with those NPCs, and you play one of them: Baelin, a fisherman with a very small selection of voice lines who, after a mishandled mysterious artifact disconnects all the players, is the only one in the world who can accept quests. Then a kaiju-sized fish-like demon lord appears, flattens the village, and goes off to prepare to destroy the world or something; now Baelin has to level up and gear up in typical RPG fashion so he can, I don’t know, find the BBEG and fish him to death.

Most of the gameplay is fishing. You complete quests by catching fish and giving them to people; you complete other quests by fishing stuff out of the water with a magnet; when you fight a boss, you hook it and try reeling it in until its HP bar depletes.

Not all of that makes sense. (This is a mild version of what I was thinking while trying to fish a dragon out of the sky.)

But you might not care, once the fishing minigame gets involved enough to be interesting. There are attack-window and timed-block mechanics involved in fighting a fish; there are spells you can get to heal and buff yourself; some fish will try to debuff you; some fish are too high-level for you until you go and grind…

Some of that doesn’t make sense, either, but what the hell.

I haven’t finished the game. It has a few problems:

• The parts that aren’t Fishing Minigame: The Game are Fetch Quest: The Game. See, for example, the number of times you can’t get what you need from the blacksmith until you fish his hammer out of the well. (Once or twice would have been enough for an Easter egg…)

• The early game invokes invisible walls to a ridiculous degree. In one quest, you’re sent by a NPC to grab something ten feet to his left; if you try walking more than a few feet to his right, or more than a few feet farther left than the quest objective, he’ll stop you. “Explore the world of Azerim,” my entire lower body.

• And later, you have the opposite problem and have to trudge halfway across the map for seemingly every quest objective, and sometimes for multiple steps in a quest. There are fast-travel gates, but they’re built from resources you fish out of the water… in bodies of water I haven’t quite gotten access to yet at the seven-hour mark. (There’s also a sprint button, the effect of which is microscopic.)

• Some of the quest writing, especially in conjunction with the above, is just banana-pants nonsensical. Example: “Oh, no, someone’s drowning in the sea! You have to pull him out with your fishing line! But first, you’ll need a boat to get out to him, so go gather shipbuilding materials, fish the blacksmith’s hammer out of the well again so he can build it, and the sorcerer will transport it to the sea! You won’t be on it when he does, so you now have to traverse half the map again, including using the boat you already own to cross the lake, to get back to where that guy probably only had a few minutes to live.”

• The spell interface was awkward, at least on mouse and keyboard, to the point where I only ever used the spells in the “top layer” of the spell selector.

And those problems started getting to me before the fishing started to get interesting. At one point, this post’s working title was “Nice Day for Fishing and the Rule of Goats.”

But then, like I said, the fishing minigame started to get interesting. That interest has started to wane now, and I’m thinking about the next game… but it took seven hours.

Seven hours of entertainment for $20 is reasonable value for money. Seven hours for $10, because I got it on sale, is even better.

Recommended for VLDL megafans who’ll get a kick out of the Easter eggs; cautiously recommended otherwise.