Frozen Lake Quest

CRINGE LTD

About this game

Frozen Lake Quest has no swapping and no tapping. You look down through the ice at a shoal of eight rows by seven columns, you drag a box across it, and when you let go the net closes. Whichever fish is the most common inside that box is what you take, and every one of that kind inside the net comes up together. The rest stay where they are.

That makes reading the shoal the whole game. A net does not have to be neat, it has to be greedy. Four smelt spread across a wide rectangle beat three sitting in a row, because the score for a haul grows with the square of how many fish come out of the water, so a net of six pays four times what a net of three pays. The limits are simple. A net can cover twelve cells at most, and it needs at least three of one kind inside or it will not close at all.

Every expedition comes with an order from the camp. Bring back a set number of one named species inside a set number of nets. Other fish still score, and you will often need to take them just to shift the shoal, but only the ordered species moves the counter. Nets you never used turn into bonus points when the order is filled.

Two sonar sweeps come with each trip. A sweep marks the strongest net on the lake for a moment and then fades, which is exactly enough to see a pattern you had missed. Using neither of them for a whole expedition is worth an honour of its own.

Ten expeditions run from the first camp out to the far quest, each opening as the one before it is finished, and eight honours track the milestones along the way. The explorer board ranks your best trip against the other anglers on the lake.

The game is portrait, fully offline, has no account, no advertising and nothing at all to buy. Everything it stores stays on your device, and the settings screen has one button that clears all of it.

What’s new

Drag a net over the shoal in Frozen Lake Quest