This game contains themes like body horror, mild gore (but it's in PS1 style graphics, so it's not too bad), some trypophobia-inducing content, and potentially disturbing imagery in the form of a low-resolution dance number performed by a marine isopod about parasitism. Proceed at your own risk.
How Fish Is Made is an indie game released in January of this year by three Swedish students. The central premise: you are a sardine, and you must choose to go Up, or to go Down. It is a game about choice, whether those are your own choice of up or down, the choices of others, or the choices you make about how you interact with the other sardines facing this existential dilemma. Externally, this doesn’t seem very SOC 375-like, but since we talk so much about the struggles of choosing what to do amidst mounting environmental crises I thought I could tie the two together. Also, this game wormed its way into my brain and lives there now, so I want to share it with others.
In HFIM, you must choose to go Up or Down, but—spoiler warning—these choices are essentially identical in result and meaningless in impact. If I recall correctly, the difference is what fish product your squirmy little sardine avatar is packaged into. That’s it. But the meat of the experience (pun intended) is within the act of choosing itself. Are you certain of down, so when the other sardines ask which way you’ll go, you answer Down every time? Or are you torn, switching up the answers you provide as you progress? Or do you just tell every fish what it wants or needs to hear, as if you didn’t have your own opinion at all? This conflict is what makes HFIM particularly impactful; taking a moment in such a surreal (and slightly disturbing) situation to reflect on how you handle choices, opinions, and communicating those things to others is a great thought exercise. As you flop down this unsettling path of winding metal tunnels mixed with uncomfortable tubes of flesh, meeting other conflicted sardines along the way, there’s an incredible message to be received about choices, however insignificant, that ultimately impact our eventual fates. Quite similar to the choices people make about environmentalism every day, interestingly enough.
The two are incredibly similar when you abstract some of the situational details. In your day-to-day life, you constantly make choices, dozens of them, determining the impact you’ll have on your environment, whether it’s an immediate, localized one or a much slower-moving global one, like choosing to cook or eat out, pick up that piece of trash on the edge of the sidewalk, buy that thing online, walk or drive—the list goes on. Ultimately, these things have a very minimal impact on everyone but you, who either benefits from or are hindered by that decision. There is an eventual larger impact, yes, but it’s very small on a per-choice basis.
The fish, meanwhile, are presented with many similar choices. Where do they go, which path do they favor, do they stay devoted to that path or do they switch it up in the middle, do they speak to the tongue-eating isopod NPC to trigger a 5-minute long musical number about internal parasites? Do they eventually choose the same route they’d been arguing for this whole journey, or do they change their mind right at the end? In the same vein, these choices are very inconsequential, as all of those sardines you spoke to are about to be ground up themselves anyways, but the impact they have on you in the moment are very real. If you tell one fish that Down is surely the way, and the next that Up is the obvious choice, you’re going to have to cope with the knowledge that you have the moral backbone of a chocolate éclair and lied to at least one of those poor sardines back there.
To finally get back on track, then, the point I’m attempting to create here is that How Fish Is Made serves as an excellently uncanny experience that emulates the same sort of choices we have to make all the time with regards to environmentally conscious living. The stakes for us are simultaneously high and low, deeply important yet nothing more than one drop in the ocean of decisions being made at every moment. Whether we choose to stick with our morality, in doing “our part” no matter how small or picking Up or Down and sticking to it, or whatever suits us best in the given circumstance, the dilemmas of choice are integral to both this game and sustainable living in the real world.
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