Webfishing has captured the old-school chatroom MMO vibes to perfection, and somehow made it so much better than I remember as a kid

GamesSportsWebfishingWebfishing has captured the old-school chatroom MMO vibes to perfection, and somehow made it so much better than I remember as a kidWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: lamedeveloper)

Webfishing

Personal Pick(Image credit: Future)In addition to our mainGame of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

Personal Pick

(Image credit: Future)In addition to our mainGame of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

(Image credit: Future)

GOTY 2024 Personal Picks

In addition to our mainGame of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

Like a lot of kids who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet in the early-to-mid 2000s, I spent a helluva lot of time in social chatroom games. Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, IMVU, and Gaia Online were in my regular rotation, being an exciting (and more importantly, free) new way of connecting with people all over the world.

Sure, they were frighteningly unmoderated and often times hostile—ripe for predatory behaviour and for folks stealing your data under the guise of letting you be the illustrious “admin” of, I dunno, something—but when I grew up and they largely vanished into the 2010s, I felt a little sad. Things have sort of reemerged with Roblox popping off, but I’ve never much resonated with a platform that is very clearly geared more towards children while I trundle through my 20s.

It’s funny, really, because as a kid I couldn’t care less about yapping with internet strangers. These days I’m far more anxious about it, so I was hesitant to fish alongside a bunch of other real humans—or dogs and cats, I guess. I cautiously threw myself into someone’s server the first time I booted Webfishing up, not entirely sure what manner of Online People I was going to deal with.

(Image credit: lamedeveloper)

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It’s the kind of chatroom experience I’d always yearned for as a kid. Being among people my age, sharing my interests even when there were cities or oceans between us. Webfishing somehow manages to perfectly encapsulate the pure vibes of early 2000s chatroom games while also making it a really pleasant, safe space to be a part of. These are my kind of weirdos, and it’s made every room I’ve joined in my hours since an absolute joy to be a part of.

It’s a vibe I have simply failed to match in anything else I’ve played this year, one which is definitely making 10-year-old Mollie feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Webfishing really is the perfect game for the folks like me, the ones who yearn to yank just a small part of their childhood back as the horrors of adult life rear their ugly head. No thoughts, just fish and yap.

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