The premise of Lure is simple. That’s how it should be. This free horror fishing game on Steam takes about four minutes to finish, so there is not much room to cram into characters, plot, story or anything else. There is hardly any time for horror. Or fishing for that matter.
When Lure starts, I’m on a lonely road because someone told me I could get paid to catch fish. I meet a faceless old man at a van on the side of the road and he tells me that if I catch a fish from the lake behind an abandoned sanctuary, he will pay me. I agree.
It’s the first 35 seconds of the game and pretty much everything I can really give away. I went out fishing and what happened next is what happened then. And despite such a short term, I got a really good scare. I also got a good laugh. Lure is only a few minutes long, but it’s still a good horror game: creepy, disturbing, jarring, and not without a sense of humor. It’s a short story in play form, and I compose it.
The extreme low-fi aesthetic helps with grainy images that make you feel like you’re seeing the experience through an old security camera, even though it’s a first-person perspective game. The sound is also excellent, a slowly growing mood of fear and dread, along with some good ambient sound effects in different areas of the game’s tiny little card.
Lure was made in 10 days for Scream Jam in October 2021, and it’s a perfect horror experience in a small size to take you into the weekend. I feel like I should write more, but such a short article feels appropriate for such a short game. Try it! Go fishing. Get scared. Have a laugh.