Free, fan-made browser game Pufferdle is an unexpectedly successful cozy mutant. Developer Abdullah Masud made it from sewing together some beloved parts—the fishing minigame from Stardew Valley, and Wordle’s streamlined hangman procedure—and ended up with a pixel fish-guesser many will find relaxing and familiar.
Posting on a Stardew Valley forum on August 21, Masud described Pufferdle’s simple premise. First, catch a fish through Stardew Valley’s strongman game format, where you have to press your mouse in order to lift a vertical green bar and trail it behind a generic fish icon’s sporadic, upstream swimming pattern. It’s the exact same fishing minigame players experience in Stardew Valley, and it uses Stardew’s exact same, wide-eyed fish—Masud copied Stardew developer ConcernedApe’s code “into JavaScript for an identical experience,” they said.
After encountering a fish, regardless of whether or not you snagged it, it’s time to guess what it was “based off of the difficulty you experienced,” Masud said in the forum post. Then, you’ll have to “use the fish’s seasons, weather, location, and time to narrow down your guess, in a Wordle format.”
Like in that guessing game, players only have six shots at finding a correct answer. You can hover over an array of Stonefish, Tuna, Angler, and more specific icons to the left of the guess section, to learn their biographic information, like where you can fish for them and at what time of day. Select a fish to input a guess—it will appear in green if it matches one of your target fish’s defining categories (season, weather, etc.), orange if it fits the bill partially, and gray if you’re completely off the mark.
Don’t despair if you aren’t entirely caught up on your Stardew fish studies. You can practice for Pufferdle’s daily games by using its Fish Tank game mode, which lets you reel in a fish of your choice as “as much as you want,” Masud wrote, and get to know its swimming habits better. Happy fishing.
