Cozy Fishing

Fishing and upgrades · free in your browser · no download, no account

What is Cozy Fishing?

Cozy Fishing is a fishing game built around one cast, repeated. You drop a hook off a small boat, steer it down through the water, haul whatever you catch back to the surface, and sell it. Then you spend the money and cast again. That is the entire game, and it holds up because each leg of the cast asks something different from you.

A cast has three acts. On the way down you are dodging: the first fish you touch hooks itself and your descent stops right there, so depth is a matter of threading gaps. On the way up you are collecting, because now every fish you brush sticks, until your hooks are full. Then the whole catch is flung into the air over the boat, and tapping a fish while it is up there banks it at double value. Anything that splashes back down still pays, just at the normal rate.

There are twenty species across twenty depth bands, from the Sunny Shallows down to the Trench, with a wreck, a whale fall, a glow garden and a vent field in between. Each band is worth roughly 75 percent more than the one above it, so the first cast into new water is always the good one.

How to play

• Cast: tap to throw. The hook arcs off the rod and splashes in.
• Sink: steer around everything on the way down. One touch ends the descent, so restraint here is what buys you depth.
• Reel: from the bottom, come back up and sweep through as many fish as your hooks can carry.
• Tap: when the catch launches skyward, tap the fish in the air. Each one you hit pays double.
• Upgrade: four tracks. Line sets how deep you can go, Hooks how many fish you can carry, Reel how fast you move, and Sonar earns money while the game is closed.

Controls

One finger, or one mouse. Tap to cast, then drag anywhere on the screen to steer the hook left and right. A tap during the descent reels you up early, which is worth knowing when the water below you looks crowded. On desktop, ESC opens the pause menu. The game runs in portrait and in landscape and rearranges itself when you rotate the phone.

Tips from the developers

• Hooks is the upgrade people skip and then regret. Capacity multiplies every fish on the return trip, so it pays back faster than it looks.
• The first time you bank a new species it pays a discovery bonus of ten times its value. One cast into a deeper band can beat a careful shallow run.
• Tap quickly once the catch is in the air. A hit doubles that fish and a miss costs you nothing, so there is no reason to be careful up there.
• Jellyfish start turning up at 120 metres and drift through everything below that. They sting instead of biting: about a second of stalled descent, and they cannot be caught at all, so route around them.
• Sonar keeps earning for up to eight hours after you close the tab. Buy a level before bed.
• Bank 25 fish in a day and your next cast hides a golden artifact deep in the water. Touching it banks fifteen times the local fish value on the spot, once per day.
• Past 750 metres you can sail to a new ocean. Income goes up by half for good, but money, upgrades and your best depth all reset, so take the trip when you are ready to rebuild rather than the minute it unlocks.

Under the hood

Cozy Fishing is made by MobX Games, a small indie studio in Germany. It is plain JavaScript on a 2D canvas, no engine, no build step. The chunky sprites are not hand drawn: they are voxel models built in code and rendered once through a pipeline that lives in the repo, which is why the fish look like little plastic toys and still weigh almost nothing to download. The money you earn while away is not a background process either, it is a single formula evaluated when you come back, and we wrote that up in How Cozy Fishing pays you while the tab is closed.

FAQ

Is Cozy Fishing free? Yes. It runs in the browser with nothing to install and no account to make.

Does my progress save? Yes. Money, upgrades, the species you have found and your achievements are stored in your browser as you play.

Can I play on my phone? Yes. It was built for phones first, and the same page works on a desktop.

Do I earn anything while I am not playing? Once you own a level of Sonar, yes, for up to eight hours away.