Steam’s latest head-scratching hangout game (don’t call it friendslop, you will rekindle Discourse) is How to Fish, a macabre novelty in which hideous worm people boat out to small cursed islands, reel in angry sealife, and blast the creatures into submission with golden sniper rifles, spending the proceeds on weapons and gadgets. I could be misinterpreting, but I don’t think the idea is sincerely to teach you How to Fish.

Possibly due to occult forces, and possibly because some celebrity streamer did a video, the game racked up around 340,000 concurrent players at launch over the weekend. For context, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s free beta also launched this weekend, attracting around 115,000 concurrents. I doubt How to Fish has a Call of Duty-sized budget, so this is a very flattering ratio. Perhaps they do have a CoD-sized budget and they blew it all on one, extremely high fidelity cod that has yet to be hooked – a fully ray-traced fish with 32k textures, lurking at the bottom of the ocean like a GPU-melting kraken.

People appear to like How to Fish, going by Steam user reviews, though I suspect that some reviewers just want to be in on the joke. To me, the game looks like the latest in a long line of broken and unheimlich comedy violence games, destined to strut and fret its hour upon the stage and then be heard no more. But let us not forget that I am a disgusting, has-been snob who wouldn’t know a Trend if it jumped out of the water and bit his knees off. Please, don’t tell the kids I said How to Fish looked unheimlich – it’s been literal months since my last death threat.

Anyway, developers Dazed Games are even now rushing to shore their creation up, with a series of patches over the weekend. If you had a go yourself, here’s a breakdown of the more significant updates.

Firstly, the game now supports eight player lobbies and private invite-only lobbies. There also shouldn’t be any more fake servers titled “Game Name”, and griefers can no longer join and instantly end the game. You can now change the session type in-game, though you’ll need to restart after doing so. The game also now saves when you press Save, Main Menu or Quit, on top of autosaving every minute, so there’s less progress loss as and when you crash. There’s now the option to invert the X and Y axis, and the minimum locked FPS has been dropped from 50 to 30.

As for bug fixes, they’ve squished one that let people travel to any island without unlocking them, which is a real kick in the Golden Snappers for speedrunners. You’ll also no longer find that skins on slotmachines turn invisible when playing in 4K.

In terms of game balance, they’ve nerfed the Pufferfish and the Whale, and “made the intended path up to the final island easier to see”. Not having played the game – I spent my weekend outside in the healthy sunshine rather than shooting low-poly tuna, though I did absolutely murder a potato salad – I can only gawp uselessly at these details. Was the Pufferfish a real arsehole before? I can only assume so. These are the fish that turn into huge spiky balls, correct? I can imagine that being a chore to balance, but then again, I’m not sure How to Fish is especially interested in smoothly graded difficulty curves.