The little jingle when you match three fish is going to be stuck in my head until I die. My wife thinks I’m balancing the checkbook in the bathroom, but really I’m watching this pixelated blonde chick in a red dress who is way too excited about my carp. The premise is dumber than a bag of hammers: you’re at a fish market, and if you can catch fish whose total price equals exactly 21, the fishmonger girl takes off a piece of clothing. It’s like someone tried to explain gambling to a toddler using only a marine biology textbook. The blonde model they used for the character has this blank smile that doesn’t change whether she’s putting on a glove or taking off her bra. It’s unnerving. But I can’t stop.

The arcade part is a brick wall. You drag these nets across a screen full of fish, and the prices are random, and my brain just does not do math quickly anymore. I had a perfect 20, spent thirty seconds dodging tuna because I needed a one-dollar shrimp, and then accidentally scooped up a three-dollar eel. Game over. She just stands there, fully dressed, looking disappointed. I nearly threw my phone into the laundry basket. The striptease reward feels like it’s actively mocking you. The animations are stiff, like a flipbook made by a distracted intern. When she does finally strip, the payoff is a weirdly unpolished set of jpegs that wouldn’t look out of place on a GeoCities page from 1998.

But here I am, waiting for the washing machine to finish its spin cycle, trying again. The real model aesthetic, that sort of grainy digitized look, is strangely more effective than those hyper-realistic games that crash my browser. It’s a cheap thrill. You win, you see a nipple. You lose, you hear that stupid jingle again and swear at a virtual halibut. The whole thing is held together with duct tape and hormones. I still don’t know if the fish prices are truly random or if the game just decides to screw you when you hit 18. Doesn’t matter. The dryer buzzed five minutes ago, I should get up. Just one more try. Maybe if I ignore the salmon.