How Fish Is Made

How Fish Is Made is a short, deliberately weird narrative experience by Lily Valeen in which you play a sardine in a machine and the central decision the world keeps pressing on you is whether to go UP or DOWN. The framing is openly surrealist — talk to your fellow fish, seek guidance from your fellow flounders, ponder the vast sea of fishly existence, and flop around the squalid wet architecture of a setting whose logic the game refuses to explain.

The interactions are simple but the writing is committed to its own register. Other fish offer prophetic advice that is sometimes useful, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes the kind of thing that should not be said by a sardine. The choice between UP and DOWN repeats throughout the experience with different stakes each time, and the underlying question of what either direction represents is left to the player to assemble from context. The original song "Little Lily Swing" by Tri-Tachyon punctuates the experience as a brief musical reprieve.

The free DLC, The Last One and Then Another, swaps the sardine narrative for a Katamari-style rolling game where you absorb fleshy bits and fellow fish in pursuit of becoming massive, with a guest appearance from Mouthwashing's Captain Curly. The studio's content warnings are accurate and self-aware: trypophobia-inducing imagery, potentially disturbing subject matter, and what the developers list as a pinch of cum. The game is short, cheap, intentionally uncomfortable, and exactly as deliberate as its premise needs it to be.