Fish don't pay bills. Slicing them does.

Salmon Samurai is an arcade slicing game with a roguelike card draft, and a bill that goes up every three days.

Hold the mouse and drag. Your paw follows the cursor, your claws leave a trail, and anything the trail crosses is cut. No buttons, no aiming, no sword. The blade is the bear. This is how a bear goes fishing: no rod, no reel, no waiting.

Cut with your hand

You make your living slicing fish out of the air, and stamina is how much of the river you get to take today. Every cut spends it. Swiping through empty air is free. Chain your kills into a combo and every cut after that gets cheaper. Clip a rock and it takes a bite out of the bar.

So every second you choose:

• Breadth: one wide sweep across a whole school.
  
• Depth: one king salmon sliced seven times before it lands, while everything else falls back in the river.

One card a morning

This is where the slicing game turns into a roguelike card game. Each morning you see three cards from a deck of forty-three and keep one. It stays for the whole run, and drawing it again levels it up. Most cards cost you something. Cards that pay more, pay later. Cards that make you faster make you hungrier. By day twenty your build is a tower of tradeoffs you chose on purpose.

Your claws go elemental

Some cards change what your claws do, not just how hard they hit:

• Fire sets fish burning, and a fish that dies burning lights the ones beside it
  
• Lightning arcs from every kill to the fish nearby, and calls bolts down on the biggest one in the air
  
• Frost freezes what you hit, and a frozen fish shatters into shards
  
• Air spins up a cyclone on your third kill that drags the river into your next stroke

Each one changes how you swipe, so each run plays differently.

Sell low. Pay on time. Repeat.

Sell the catch to a raccoon who underpays you. Spend it in a shop of forty-five charms and relics. Pay the beaver every third day. The bill goes up every cycle; the day does not get longer. Miss it once and a FINAL NOTICE ends the run.

It never ends. It only gets harder.

There is no final day. Salmon Creek scales until it takes you, and what you banked on the way down is honey. Honey unlocks new cards for the draft and new items for the shop: more choices, not bigger numbers. The one exception is the ration tin, forty-five small capped upgrades to stamina, reach, damage and the rest. Nothing you unlock plays the game for you.

Also in the river

• Snags, rocks, driftwood, logs and boulders that cost you stamina when you hit them
  
• Eagles that steal the salmon you were four cuts into
  
• Sturgeon that bounce your claws off, and golden salmon that do not want to be caught
  
• Six kinds of weather with their own visitors: owls at night, ravens in the fog, a phoenix in the heat wave and a thunderbird in the storm
  
• Thirty-five Steam achievements

For about ten seconds it plays like the slice games you already know. Then the first card lands.

Good to know

• Plays in English, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese.
  
• Mouse, trackpad or touchscreen. No controller needed, and none supported.
  
• Paid once: no ads, no in-app purchases.
  
• Anonymous crash and balance reports help fix and tune the game; both switch off in Settings.