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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.