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

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.
(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

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

Cold and oily, you leave one long wet streak along the sheet metal as you proceed unstoppably to your ending, the journey only interrupted by the interjections of other fish. There's the one raving in the grip of a religious epiphany, the other who has embraced rank scientism, the one who has intertwined with a six-pack ring and decided it's a throne. On and on they go, all rooted in place, cooking up half-baked ideologies to cover their dread at an existence in the heart of a hideous and unfathomable machine.

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

(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

Cheery stuff. And the machine only gets more disturbing as you flop through it. Steel gives way to flesh gives way to… something? Gum? And endless arrays of vibrating lotus seed heads. It's all deliberately revolting, and that's before a tongue-eating louse—one of those parasites that slices off and replaces the tongues of fish—performs a literal song and dance routine that feels like it could have been written by LinkedIn.

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.

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

(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

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.

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

The world is a big, disgusting body, but it is a body we build, and we all build it, slapping along the big machine—lapsing into philosophy and religion and egomania to justify ourselves—and ultimately making no real choices of consequence. By the time you actually get to the (excellent) musical number by the tongue parasite—a parasite which has literally filled the mouth of its terrified host with platitudes about productivity and the growth mindset, the point is almost too on the nose.

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

(Image credit: Wrong Organ)

It's disgusting because one of the primary motivating affects of fascism is disgust, and if fascism is capitalism in decay then that disgust is present, in embryo, in capitalism. Fascism's disgust at supposed foreign intruders into the body politic doesn't start out life that way. It is at first as the disgust of atomised, isolated individuals with themselves for participating in the machine that is killing them. One of fascism's key appeals is the psychological wage it offers: to sublimate that disgust into a disgust for the other, built on an illusory sense of superiority conferred on you by… what is ultimately just a cheap six-pack ring you've ensnared yourself in.

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.

Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

Read more
Close up of Curly post-crash in Mouthwashing, showing his one remaining eye and bandaged body.
Mouthwashing review
Facing an enemy in No-Skin
No-Skin is an incredibly simple horror roguelike about the worst party ever, full of strong booze, bad conversation and eldritch violence
Fighting a masked enemy with an axe
Butcher's Creek is a short, sweet and brutal FPS video nasty from the maker of Dusk
Obenseuer
This brutalist life sim gave me a free tenement block to renovate, but my mushroom addiction kept getting in the way
Stabbing an enemy in the shoulder
How Dishonored and Deathloop led to a mesmerising indie horror game about tending to a monstrous train
Close up of Curly post-crash in Mouthwashing, showing his one remaining eye and bandaged body.
This year has proved yet again that horror games do best when devs keep it small-scale
Latest in Horror
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Silent Hill f transmission trailer screenshots
'We've been keeping fans waiting for an awfully long time': We finally got to see more of Silent Hill f and boy, does it look great
One of Repo's player characters, resembling a yellow pedal bin with googly eyes, encounters a skeletal, open mouthed face with glowing yellow eyes.
After REPO 'kinda blew up', its developer asks the community for advice on how to make matchmaking lobbies
R.E.P.O. screenshots
REPO is my new favourite co-op horror game, which combines Lethal Company's looting loop with Content Warning's zany monsters
Blood Typers
Blood Typers is a budget-priced fusion of Typing of the Dead and co-op survival horror
Phasmophobia Bleasdale Farm rework images
Phasmophobia is getting a big rework for one of its oldest maps, turning the Bleasdale Farmhouse into a horrifying and confusing maze
Latest in Features
Geralt, two swords on his back, in the wilderness
2011 was an amazing comeback year for PC gaming
Alligator skull with glowing eyes on human body and cords coming out sitting at piano with "The Norwood Etudes" ready to play
My new most anticipated RPG let me be a kleptomaniac gourmand set loose in a noir city on a quest to make 'the perfect sandwich'
Monster Hunter Wilds' stockpile master studying a manifest
Monster Hunter Wilds' new gyro controls are a fantastic option for disabled and able-bodied players alike
Manhunt 2
I played the notoriously ratings-board-ravaged Manhunt 2 and was quite glad for the censorship actually
Wyrdsong concept art
Wyrdsong, the RPG from ex-Bethesda talent, isn't dead—but it's no longer an open world: 'We're down to a skeleton crew'
A busy marketplace in The Bazaar.
The Bazaar could be the future of autobattlers, if it stops strangling itself to death with its own microtransactions