A rod, some bait, and a body of water can be some peoples’ idea of a perfect waste of time. And many gamers would agree, but just without the going outside bit.

One of the most popular mini-games to be found in videogames is fishing. You will find it in diverse titles such as Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Red Dead Redemption, Far Cry 5 to name but a few.

And in a nice meta twist, Everybody’s Golf even has an unlockable fishing mini-game.

This then is a fishing game in its own right, but one that doesn’t rely on you simply catching the biggest fish, but using your rod and various bait to save the land.

You play NPC Baelin the Fisherman, who was quietly minding his own business when and evil force was unleashed across the land of Azerim. Somehow it not only gave him the ability to become a playable character, but the game’s hero.

He may be a man of very, very few words, but the destiny of the land is in his hands, or more specifically, his rod.

He is given multiple quests from those left in the land, mainly those in the town of Honeywood, which mainly involve him taking to the water and fishing for creatures that lurk beneath the surface. Each fish he lands is a battle, in a standard RPG fashion, where Baelin will receive experience points for every catch.

Baelin is the land’s only hope, but is he truly the hero everyone expects him to be?

A genre that has grown over the years in film and TV is the mockumentary, one of the best is This is Spinal Tap, as a documentary crew follow the band on tour. Nice Day for Fishing can be best described as the gaming equivalent of the mockumentary, as it lovingly portrays an RPG game through the past time of fishing.

It has a deliciously quirky sense of humour as you embark on a number of silly quests, as you fish to level up, giving you the ability to access other areas of the 2D pixelated side-scrolling world.

Fishing may well be a major element of the game, but at its heart it’s an RPG, with many, many fetching quests, that do start to feel a little generic at times, but you put up with them due to the humorous interactions with the characters throughout the land.

And even though the fishing part of most mini-games is supposed to be fairly relaxing, it happens to be the most tense part here, particularly during boss battles that are properly epic, so much so that you may have to have a few goes at defeating them, using alternative spells and equipment to see if a certain combo of them give you the edge.

The gameplay may become repetitive, and the world feeling a little too small – although there’s no need to warp from one part of the world to another, there is a lot of walking back and forth that gets a little tiresome – it’s humour and wink-wink knowledge towards the world of RPG’s will keep you thoroughly entertained, cast after cast.

So if you like fishing – the video game version, natch – and retro RPG’s, Nice Day for Fishing will have you fall for its many charms hook, line and sinker.