I’ll give you my answer first, because hedging would be against the whole spirit of the thing: yes. Fishing in Stardew Valley is a little bit cruel, and it’s cruel in a specific, revealing way — not because it’s violent, but because it’s the exact opposite, because it has made killing so frictionless and so pleasant that you stop noticing it’s killing at all. And that, I think, is more unsettling than blood would be, and it’s worth sitting with, because it says something about how we launder harm.
Here’s the mechanic, stripped of its charm. You cast a line, a fish bites, you play a soothing little timing minigame — keep the green bar over the fish, a gentle back-and- forth, genuinely one of the most relaxing loops in the game — and then you catch it, and a cheerful sound plays, and a number goes up, and the fish goes into your bag to be sold or cooked. You have hunted and killed an animal. The game knows this; it’s a fish, you caught it, it’s not swimming anymore. But every single design choice around that fact is engineered to make sure it never lands as killing. The music is calm. The animation is cute. There’s no struggle you have to witness, no death you have to see, just a satisfying ding and a fish icon and your rising fishing skill. It’s the most peaceful thing in the game, and it is, if you look directly at it, a small factory of death with a lovely soundtrack.
Now — the honest counterargument, because a take worth anything has to survive one: it’s a game. The fish isn’t real. Nothing suffers. Getting worked up about pixel fish is exactly the kind of overserious that curdles into faux-profundity, and you’d be right to be suspicious of anyone who genuinely lies awake over it. I’m not lying awake. But I don’t think the point requires the fish to be real. The point is about me, the player, and what the design is training me to feel, or rather not feel. The cruelty isn’t done to the fish. It’s done to my attention.
Because here’s what actually gets me: the frictionlessness is the tell. In real fishing — even real, ordinary, morally unremarkable fishing — there’s friction. There’s the fish gasping, the hook, the small unavoidable moment where you’re confronted with the fact that you’ve taken a life for your dinner, and that friction is good, it’s the thing that keeps you honest about what you’re doing. Stardew sands all of that off. It gives you the harvest with none of the confrontation, the killing with none of the death, and in doing so it does the thing I actually find sinister: it makes taking a life feel like nothing at all — like a minigame, like a chore checked off, like weeding. And that’s not a fishing problem. That’s the whole modern relationship with where food comes from, rendered as a pleasant loop. We have gotten extraordinarily good at receiving the animal without meeting the death, and Stardew’s fishing is just an unusually honest little model of it, honest precisely because it’s so smoothly dishonest.
So is fishing cruel in a game about kindness? Yes — but not to the fish, and that’s the part worth keeping. It’s cruel to your capacity to notice, because it rehearses you, gently, pleasantly, hundreds of times, in the art of taking a life and feeling only satisfaction. The game about slowing down and living deliberately contains, right at its calmest center, a perfectly frictionless machine for not noticing what you’re doing. I don’t think that makes the game bad. I think it makes it accidentally honest — a cozy game that can’t help including the exact mechanism by which cozy things let us look away. I still fish. I catch the catfish in the rain and the music is lovely and the number goes up. But I’ve started, on purpose, to notice the little ding, and to think, just for a half-second each time: that was an animal, and I felt nothing, and the feeling-nothing was the whole design. Then I cast again. That half-second of noticing is, I think, the entire moral content available here — and the game will happily let you skip it forever, which is exactly the problem.