Icefishing

Icefishing is a homebrew game by Team Zenden where you get a job fishing through ice to repair your snowmobile. It was released on 02 Feb 2026 for the 2025 64brew game jam.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password gotabigone or from Drive. The code seems to be unavailable from Github (probably made private), so there’s a backup on Drive.

About Icefishing

In this 3D adventure you play as a furry cat (tiger, snow leopard?) who has crashed his snowmobile into a barren snowland and needs to get it back up and running. There’s a single cottage in the middle of the snowstorm, and it turns out that it has everything you need: Parts for your vehicle and a job so that you can earn them.

The game is based on a fairly basic loop: You buy fishing materials, you catch fish, you sell them back, Repeat until you have enough to repair your snowmobile. If you’ve played Animal Crossing, it’ll all be very familiar to you.

The outdoors contains a pretty large wasteland which is daunting at first, but once you realise that you can run by pressing the L button it becomes a cakewalk. Here you can find the cottage and a small pond where you can fish. There’s also a weird path near the starting point that leads to out of bounds.

Inside the cottage there is a cozy living area with a bed, TV, walls and fireplace. Here you’ll find the walrus that lives here, and he’ll give you a simple rod and some sample bait. You can buy more advanced gear, more bait and spare parts for your snowmobile.

Once you get the starting gear, you can head outside and start fishing. You cast out your rod onto the pond and aim it as you wish (not sure how it helps), and wait for a bite. Once you manage to lure a fish to your bait, you need to mash the A button faster than your fishy opponent in order to catch it. Rarer fish are harder to pull of course.

That’s pretty much the game loop. You just have to repeat it several times hoping you get good rolls at the pond.

Fish list

Credits

Icefishing was made by Team Zenden which consists of:

• Zest
• Ghumdraup
• Moxy
• Cobra!
• Blamerobots

They didn’t mention who did what.

Review and conclusion

As I mentioned before, this game reminds me of Animal Crossing. Not only are the characters animals, but the gameplay loop is very similar. You go out and catch fish, sell them, rinse and repeat until you accumulate enough money to make your purchases. That would be repetitive, but the game keeps it interesting by having a wide variety of fish to catch and a relaxing environment to do it in.

What’s really incredible is the attention to detail when it comes to Icefishing’s presentation. The camera works well, there’s a lot of effects like the snow and it even finds a way to use N64 fog to the game’s advantage. I especially love the way the fishing line relaxes when you cast it into the pond.

The one big issue holding this game back is the crashes. There is a major bug that I encountered which occurs when entering and leaving the cottage: the RSP just crashes. It happens more than 50 of the time so I can roll for luck the first couple of times, but there’s no chance I can make it until the end of the game in one go. To record the video above, I had to restart the game five times before I could make it to the pond to demonstrate the fishing.

I really do hope they fix this bug since Icefishing is a really good game that deserves being finishable. My guess is that they did all their testing on an emulator, or an NTSC N64 (I use PAL) and that the game works well otherwise, but I really would have liked to make it all the way to the end and see my dear snowmobile take me away like a chariot to freedom.