  |
This article's content is marked as Mature The page contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page. |
|
| “ | I only caught a glimpse of you. But I saw... a lifetime in that glimpse. A life in which... I beg and plead to spend with you. Hear me, Sedna. I've given you everything I hold dear to myself. My wife is no longer a hook in our mouths. My daughter is with you in the blue majestic depths. Please, come back to me. Show me what you require. I will provide it for you, my goddess. I pray you heed my request. Let me be your one. | „ |
| ~ The Uncle's plea to Sedna found in one of the bottles. |
The Uncle is the main antagonist of the indie horror fishing simulator Fishing Vacation.
Biography
The game's protagonist receives a letter from an old friend, asking him if he would embark on a fishing trip to his uncle's old cabin, where they used to fish as children over ten years ago. Overwhelmed by nostalgia, the hero accepts the offer.
While his friend is in the midst of driving to the assigned place, a small chat ensues, during which he mentions that the uncle has mailed him the key along with an invitation to the cabin, which turns out to be the first time he had contacted him in years and also recalls that he's been going through the divorce in the past, but was surprisingly happy about it. They arrive at the decrepit-looking cabin shortly after and enter it.
To their surprise, the cabin seems to be have been abandoned, but the hero's friend gleefully dismisses that and notes that they still have some daylight left, so he instructs the protagonist to grab the fishing poles and meet him out back. As he explores the cabin in search of the poles, it becomes more and more apparent how strange the whole situation is. Despite the uncle mailing them a key, he's nowhere to be found, while the cabin itself is filled with the fish-related memorabilia and shows signs of a sudden disappearance of its occupants, with the table set for a family of three and dirty plates sitting on it, a trashcan full of fishbones and a fridge exclusively containing severed fish heads. A note taped to the wall, saying "We're leaving. Don't come looking for us", raises even more suspicions. However, the most compelling details of the interior are the book on the Inuit mythos, telling of a tragic story of Sedna, the sea goddess, and a cellar trapdoor locked with three padlocks. Against his better judgement, the protagonist decides to ignore all the bad omens, grabs both fishing poles and accompanies his friend to the lake behind the cabin.
An early fishing session proves to be rather unremarkable, aside from the heroes dragging out someone's shoe from the lake's bottom, so the return to the cabin and both go to bed, anticipating the first official day of their vacation.
Just as an early session, the first day doesn't bear any significant value on the plot, serving as an introduction into the game's fishing mechanics and teaches the player about acquiring enough worms as a bait from a specific patch of soil near the lake.
From now on, the conclusion of this story depends on the amount of investigation and effort from the player's side and has four possible outcomes.
Ending A
Day two is when the events take an unexpected turn for the worst and requires the player to make a series of choices, some meaningless and some will determine whether the protagonist and his friend will solve the cabin's mystery and make it out alive.
The atmosphere becomes more tense as the hero finds his friend standing motionless in front of a window. Apparently, he appears to be pretty disturbed by the nightmare he had during the night and is eager to tell you about it. Listening to him is not essential for getting any of the endings, however it sheds more light on the situation, as he mentions being paralyzed in his bed and seeing a figure behind the window. Unbeknownst to the friend, it was Sedna herself.
The hero reads the continuation of Sedna's story and then proceeds to fish along with his fellow, although this time the lake has a lot more in store for them. While amazed at the amount of sea creatures (some of which don't even live in the fresh water) that they're able to catch, they also note that an unknown presence is watching them from afar. At one point, at the far away part of the lake, a pale hand reaches out of the water to snatch the bait after it has been thrown in and attaches something to it. It turns out to be the key to one of the padlocks from the cellar trapdoor. Later, on his way back to the cabin, for a brief moment the protagonist spots a pale creature that speeds off into the woods before he is able to have a good look at it. Similar to his friend, the hero had no idea the creature he saw was the Uncle.
After the protagonist goes to sleep, the friend wakes him up during the night and asks if he's interested in a little bit of a night fishing, since they only got one day left on their vacation. Agreeing to this request is crucial to achieving this ending.
Just mere minutes into their session, they both hear a loud splash, as if something heavy has just jumped into the lake. In the distance, a head of the pale creature can be seen staring at the characters and the whispers can be heard all around them. Sedna and the uncle patiently watch the heroes and later leave them a present on the land. As they return to the cabin, a trail of dead fish leads to the key lying on the ground, covered in fish guts. By picking it up, the protagonist even more close to the truth.
The third day takes the horror of the heroes' predicament to a whole another level. After the protagonist finds out that the rest of the Inuit mythos book has been ripped out, he pays a visit to their usual worm-finding spot. While gathering worms, he feels as though he had struck something solid. Digging deeper into the soil reveals a skeleton. Despite its obvious humanoid shape, the heroes cope with their gruesome discovery by dismissing it as an animal skeleton and prepare for their final fishing session.
Although it goes smoothly and without incidents at first, one of the catches sends the protagonist's friend into panic as he instantly pleads with him to throw it back in. The fateful item is a right shoe with the final key to the cellar tied to its shoelaces, which forms a pair with the one caught on the first day. The hero's friend seems to recognize it, but is too frightened to finish his thought and connect the dots, so he encourages the protagonist to keep on fishing.
With all the keys obtained and the three locks gone, the heroes decide to check the cellar out. The protagonist descends as his friend waits outside and soon finds himself in a short tunnel with a few turns. At the end of it lies the revelation. He discovers that someone has been secretly living there all along, which is evident by the filthy bed that has been used recently. Gradually more unsettling are the start of a hole with a shovel beside it and a crude statue made out of mud and bones - a tribute to Sedna. There he finds the remaining pages of Sedna's story that have been ripped out and a number of glass bottles, each one with a pice of paper inside, its writings always the same. It appears to be a "love" letter written by none other than the Uncle himself, expressing his undying feelings towards Sedna and outwardly confessing to murdering his wife and child, as a way of appeasing her, which explains why the lake near the cabin was so bountiful with fish and why his friend found those shoes familiar - they are likely to have belonged to his now deceased little cousin. The protagonist grabs one of the bottles with him and prepares to leave the accursed cabin for good.
Just as they both exit the cabin, his friend suddenly remembers that he's left the car keys by the sink, but is reluctant to reenter the building himself, so he entrusts the hero with this task. Thus, the protagonist returns to the cabin alone and is the only one to witness the climax of this morbid scenario. Right after he takes the car keys and is about to leave, someone barges in through the back door. The Uncle, who the hero simply sees as a humanoid monster, gives him a short chase out of the cabin, but ultimately the protagonist manages to escape and along with his friend.
Upon properly decompressing and letting go of their near-death experience, the heroes alert the authorities about what happened inside the cabin. They presented the police with the note from the bottle, giving them a good reason to search the whole building from top to bottom, with that turning up no clues about the Uncle's whereabouts, leading to that part of the mountain being closed off to the public. They even combed through the lake's floor, but couldn't find anything. The only thing they could fish out were some of the largest trout they had ever seen.
Ending B
This bitter-sweet conclusion is achieved if the player chooses to not tempt the fate and goes through every fishing session of the game without ever touching any key or assembling all of them, thus never learning about the cellar's contents.
While most of the aforementioned unnerving events still take place in this route, the vacation ends with the protagonist leaving the cabin with many of his questions unanswered and the thoughts of it haunting him at night. The hero isn't discouraged even after receiving a letter from his friend, expressing his unwillingness to return to the cabin and resentment towards it.
The protagonist's curiosity takes the better of him and he's planning on going back to the dangerous place, while hoping to survive his endeavor. It's never clarified whether he was successful or not.
Ending C
Should the protagonist decline the friend's request about the night fishing, the next day he will notice that his usually energetic buddy is still in his bedroom behind the closed door and is barely able to talk. He assures the hero that he feels a bit under the weather and convinces him to spend his last fishing session without him.
After the hero is done fishing, the friend, who is still in the bedroom, tells him to just head to the car and wait for him. He comes out, straining to do so, but for some reason doesn't respond to the protagonist's concerns and they drive in a total silence all the way home. He even had to guide the friend onto the right path a few times, which is strange, considering he was supposed to know them extremely well.
Once the characters arrived home, the protagonist got out of the car and went to his friend's window to say goodbye. His only answer was a blank stare before he abruptly reversed out of the hero's driveway.
Unfortunately for the protagonist, he had managed to get a good look at his friend's eyes before he sped off. They were the eyes of a dead fish.
It's never revealed what occurred during that night while the hero was asleep, and what possessed/took hold of his friend's body.
Ending D
Arguably the most dreadful outcome awaits the player if he allows the protagonist to get captured by the Uncle during the chase in the final segment of Ending A.
After getting knocked out, the protagonist wakes up at nighttime, lying on the lake's dock. As he slowly regains his consciousness, a hideous head emerges from the water. Everything goes black and the splashing sounds can be heard, pointing towards the hero's demise, who is either drowned by Sedna or gets subjected to a worse fate.
Appearance
The Uncle is a naked, bald male with a deathly pale skin, whose mouth is either always gaping or is cracked and rotten around the sides, giving him an appearance of a decaying corpse.
Personality
The Uncle is portrayed as obsessive, devoted and generally susceptible to being easily infatuated or engrossed in certain activities. It becomes readily apparent just from inspecting his cabin, as it's decorated with all sorts of fish-related objects, including photos, pictures and books on the matter, indicating that he was most likely a fisherman.
However, the most crucial object for him and the one that led to his downward spiral into madness is the book on Inuit mythology, which documents a story that particularly fascinated him, namely the one about the goddess of the sea, Sedna, which he had probably already met in the past, got entranced by her supernatural charm (as seen in the game, her guise is quite repulsive, so it's unlikely that he was mesmerized by the "beauty" alone) and couldn't get over that instance.
Sometime later after encountering her, the uncle filed for divorce to get rid of any obstacles between him and Sedna. Nevertheless, he found it insufficient to prove his dedication towards his beloved one, so he murdered his wife and daughter, with the latter being drowned in the lake as a testament to his love for Sedna, as both of her shoes can be found in the lake, and the wife's remains buried behind the cabin. Both acts are described in an excited and poetic manner, stating that his wife was just a "hook in their mouths" and the daughter is in the "majestic blue depths", once again relating to his fixation on the marine life and everything that it's connected to and the fact that in his eyes it was a selfless act from his side, as he previously mentioned his relatives as "everything he held dear to himself", meaning that he had genuine affection to them, but was simply too far gone and desperate to see any other options. It's reinforced by the findings in his cellar, since he had tried to reach Sedna through the bottled messages countless times and even created a crude sculpture in her honor.
It's further signified by the uncle's current mental and physical state. He's almost completely given up on his humanity and freedom, basically becoming Sedna's slave, as he spends most of his time either in the lake or in the cellar and feeds off of fish heads, which he stores in the cabin's fridge. He went to great lengths to ensure that he wouldn't be caught and could still serve his mistress, like the tunnel in his cellar that he dug in order to traverse between the lake and his hideout undetected, although some of his methods are quite clumsy and significantly raise the protagonist's suspicion, like the note that he taped to the wall and the amount of padlocks securing the cellar door.
His now feral, predatory nature is easily evident both from his exterior and behavior. He stealthily stalks his "sacrifices" across their stay at the cabin, leaving cryptic clues about the truth and his actual intentions in a form of keys to the cellar, though it's not particularly clear as to why he would do that, since all of his previous actions were aimed at covering up all of his deeds. He's completely naked everywhere he's seen, possibly to be "closer" to Sedna, and appears to have a serious facial wound, which either stems from his lack of self-care or is the result of some bizarre metamorphosis.
Despite his savage attitude and mental degradation, he still possessed enough wits to trick his nephew and his friend into coming to the cabin by mailing them a key and was able to disappear from the lake's premises right after they reported him to the police and has managed to evade the arrest.
Powers and Abilities
- Fishing knowledge: Considering his supposed occupation and obsession with the fish-related topics, it's assumed that he has a vast knowledge of the underwater fauna, as well as expertise in spotting and catching it.
- Swimming skills: As seen during the night fishing session, he's able to swim around in the water with a considerable speed and hold his breath for long periods of time.
- Speed and Stealth: He seems to be just as nimble on the ground, always moving out of the protagonist's sight and conceiling himself effectively both in the shadows and in the water. He demonstrates the same characteristics while chasing the hero during the final segment of Ending A, being able to catch up to him almost effortlessly.