How Fish Is Made is the most disgusting horror game I've ever played, and it perfectly captures 2024

GamesHorrorHow Fish Is Made is the most disgusting horror game I’ve ever played, and it perfectly captures 2024When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

A fish and a tongue-eating louse in a fancy hat begin a song and dance routine against a sparkly pink background, wielding used Q-tips.

I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game moredisgustingthan How Fish Is Made, a short, swimmy, PS1-style narrative game from the people who made this year’sMouthwashing. Set in the guts of some kind of giant, biomechanical apparatus, you play a helpless, useless fish as they slap their way along it.

(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

A photograph of a mountain of dead fish, overlaid with text reading “Do fish feel pain?"

Rotting from the head

Don’t let that dissuade you. In fact, let it encourage you. How Fish Is Made is one of the best games I’ve played in months, and clocks in at a cool 20 minutes or so and a price of entirely free.

To be frank, I’ve already mostly described the actual gameplay to you. You proceed through a great, dread machine and occasionally chat to other fish trapped within. Most of them have a question for you: once you reach the end, are you going to go up or down? It’s the only choice you make across the whole game, and it’s not really a choice at all.

How Fish Is Made is not about fish and it is not about how they are made, which in real life is—I understand—a complex biological process that often involves clouds of spermatozoa released underwater, and has very little to do with really big machines or the PS1’s wobbly vertices.

(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

Lotus seed pods line the walls in How Fish Is Made.

It’s about, well,the system, man, and the little doomed roles we all occupy within it. It’s only natural to feel disgust at a world whose machinery is cooking the planet, and which impoverishes entire continents. It’s only natural to transfer that disgust onto yourself when, every day, you wake up early to make yourself neat and tidy so you can get along to your own part in perpetuating it, however small, and however necessary to sustaining yourself and your life that is.

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It’s about, well, the system, man and the little doomed roles we all occupy within it

(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

A fish rants that going up is surely the correct answer.

Quite a lot of heady themes to squeeze into a 20-minute game about a fish where all you do is decide whether to go up or down. I suddenly can’t wait to get my hands on Mouthwashing: These are smart devs doing smart, creative work, and the meaning of the choice they offer—up or down—is clear as day. There’s no true liberation that keeps you in the machine.

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Rotting from the head#

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Rotting from the head

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