Anglerfisch by Arluci
You're a teeny-tiny anglerfish in a big, scary ocean — and everything wants to eat you! In this cute 3D survival adventure, you’ll need to dodge hungry sharks and gobble up smaller fish to grow bigger, stronger, and maybe just a little bit fearsome yourself.
Developed in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 57 by a team of 6, this game was a personal C++ deep-dive, built in Unreal Engine.
Can you survive the depths... or will you become someone else’s snack?
Controls: WASD - move Mouse - Camera angle SPACE - dash, eat F - light switch



| Link | https://arluci.itch.io/anglerfisch |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/anglerfisch |
Ratings
| Overall | 402th | 3.607⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 569th | 3.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 550th | 3.089⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 125th | 4.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 81th | 4.429⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 294th | 3.536⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 271th | 3.259⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 304th | 3.786⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
And yeah, our 3D Artists really did an outstandig job! Seeing our protagonist for the first time was jawdropping :D
- Not make eat/dash the same button, this was quite annoying
- Dash had zero cooldown so you could spam it and move insanely fast
- The fish were kinda hard to find, i didn't manage to find 20
As for the gameplay, to be honest, I didn’t really figure it out — after 10 minutes I barely managed to catch a single fish. The game feels pretty difficult.
The chase ambient is cool, but I didn’t fully understand the mechanic: I just kept smashing the spacebar until I flew off the edge of the map, and the fish seemed to fall behind. Maybe it’d be worth adding invisible walls or some kind of boundary to prevent leaving the map.
Now, moving on, one thing that personally bugged me a little was the controls. Don’t get me wrong, they’re solid, but I think having dedicated buttons for going up and down would feel better, kind of like how Shift and Space work when flying in Minecraft. As for the dash, it feels more natural to map it to the left mouse button, especially since we’re already using the mouse to aim.
And yeah, I agree with the other comments, the game is a little on the though side and fish are definitely hard to find
One more thing I should mention (not sure if it’s performance related or just my laptop), after about 15 minutes of playing, the frame rate dropped hard, like, down to 10 FPS (Again, not sure if that’s the game or if my laptop was just throttling)
In the shell hiding spot, when I tried to exit, the character slipped under the terrain for some reason, but when I went back in and tried again, it worked fine.
Overall, it was a good experience with beautiful visuals. Nice work!