You've got bigger fish to fly.
I Am Fish is a 2021 physics/puzzle game developed by Bossa Studios, the same folks behind I Am Bread and Surgeon Simulator, and published by Curve Games.
The game focuses on the adventures of four fish friends in a pet store: Goldfish, Pufferfish, Flying Fish and Piranha, who one day are separated from each other after a series of mishaps. And thus begins their epic quest to reunite and escape back to sea...by rolling, flopping, bouncing, gliding and tumbling their way across various environments— all while avoiding death by suffocation that threatens any fish out of water.
This game has examples of:
- Advancing Wall of Doom: Done by the fish on at least two occasions:
- The culmination of Piranha's blood flood in the hospital is a torrent of blood surging through the hallways, eventually leading outside.
- After hijacking a 500 gallon fish-tank-on-wheels, all four fish collectively use it as a battering ram to break open the aquarium's central tank, sending a torrent of water surging through the city streets, and ultimately flowing into the bay.
- All Deaths Final: Iron Fish mode requires the player to complete levels in a single try, even a single death will send them back to the beginning.
- Ambiguous Gender: The game avoids stating the actual gender of the four fish.
- Artificial Human: "Bobs" are apparently created to be brain-dead human bodies for surgeons to practice on. But some of them woke up, escaped the labs, and are now living among the populace, unaware of what they are and with no way to tell them apart from normal humans. Their blood is the stuff that makes the bread and fish sentient.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- Goldfish and piranhas are freshwater fish, while flying fish and pufferfish are saltwater. The game makes no distinction between either, with all of them able to survive in any water, and in Piranha and Pufferfish's cases, blood and stomach acid.
- The fish die within seconds of leaving the water, even though typical aquarium fish can survive at least five minutes or so (likely Acceptable Breaks from Reality to balance gameplay difficulty).
- When pufferfish puff up, they do not become more buoyant (they suck in water, not air), nor can they remain inflated out of the water. The act of puffing up is also rather traumatic and physically straining for the fish; doing it repeatedly in short succession would injure it badly.
- Benevolent Architecture: There are always convenient paths to roll a fishbowl through, pipes to transition from one area to another, or pools of water in places you really wouldn't expect them to allow the fish to proceed. Not to mention all the inexplicable perfectly-round fishbowls or jars full of water people seem to leave lying around.
- Butt-Monkey: Poor Greg keeps running into various misfortunes at the hands of the fish. First his cleaning bucket is stolen by Goldfish. Next, Flying Fish causes him to lose his luggage. Then he gets sick after accidentally swallowing Pufferfish. But the worst has got to be during Piranha's section, where he first gets seriously injured after the fish manages to cause a car accident, which is bad enough. But to further rub salt on the wound, he is then caught and in a literal river of blood (again caused by Piranha) through the hospital. By the final level he's a nervous wreck and paranoid of every fish he sees, which is probably not helped by him being caught in the massive water flow that comes from the aquarium's destruction.
- Canon Welding: This game takes place in the same continuity of the other Bossa Studios games: eating the sentient bread from I Am Bread gives the four fish the intelligence and desire to escape, and the surgeon from Surgeon Simulator is a recurring obstacle in the hospital level. Some background chatter also ties the three games together with an explanation as to how the bread became sentient, why it found its way into Mr. Murton's hands, and how the (accidental) creator of the stuff is related to Nigel Burke.
- Carnivore Confusion: The Piranha is best friends with the other fish and makes no attempts to eat them. He appears to like bread.
- Four-Man Band: The protagonist fish: basic Goldfish with no particular in-game abilities but capable to use it's shiny body to signal the other fish to bring them back together, Flying Fish who can glide short distances, Pufferfish who can inflate and roll, and Piranha who can bite onto objects and break them.
- Made of Iron: The number of bumps and hits and moments without oxygen the fish take without getting splatted is impressive. Especially obvious when Piranha tries to cross a highway: the danger from the cars is not getting splattered upon being run over, but the fact that the cars will knock you far away from the water-filled pot holes Piranha needs to rest in to breathe.
- Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: They're just four friends trying to reunite in the ocean, they don't mean to flood a hospital with blood, or completely destroy an aquarium.
- Mobile Fishbowl: A literal, rolling one at first, but mop buckets, bottles and even a drunk man's stomach at one point also suffice.
- Mythology Gag: The original, less-expressive Goldfish design from the beta appears as a separate character.
- Nostalgia Level:
- Goldfish rolls through the kitchen from I Am Bread, which is complete with that game's first level music blaring from a radio.
- Not exactly a level, but the Piranha could stumbled on top the very same desk that being used as the menu screen of Surgeon Simulator 2013.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo:
- Nigel Burke appears as an obstacle in the Pirahna's final level, as he chases Pirahna around for having interrupted one of his "surgeries".
- The loaf of bread from I Am Bread is shown in the opening scene being sold to Mr. Murton. Additionally, the pieces of those bread also serves as collectible item throughout the game.
- Sequel Hook: The Fish break out of the aquarium, freeing all the fish and destroying the bakery that sold the sentient bread, but the game ends on a seagull eating that very same piece of bread.
- Silent Protagonist: The fish never talk, only making simple vocal noises in cutscenes. Though it's justified given that they're... well, fish.
- Some Dexterity Required: The controls for the game are remarkably simple and intuitive when compared to Bossa Studios' previous games... unless you enable "Bossa-style" controls. These require you to hold a button and wiggle the control stick just to move your fish forward.
- Space Zone: The Bonus Level has the fish in an abandoned orbiting space shuttle. Navigation is even more complex than normal due to the complete lack of gravity and the resulting free-floating bubbles of water.
- Stealth Run: There's an achievement for getting through Pufferfish's second level without ever alerting seagulls to your presence. It requires you to be very slow and silent... which is tricky since most of the relevant sections take place in a jar.
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: To finish Pufferfish's second level, you have to get caught by the fisherman.
- Super Drowning Skills: Inverted: the fish will die within seconds out of water, even the Flying Fish if he glides too long.
- Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: The Flying Fish's gliding controls are... unintuitive, to say the least. Mostly because they follow semi-realistic gliding physics. Holding a direction in an attempt to move that way will, at best, result in a completely useless barrel roll as the fish continues moving straight forward. Instead, you have to nudge the fish's fins to the correct angle and then stop, just letting the air currents do the rest.
- Uplifted Animal: Accidental example. The sentient bread from I Am Bread when fed to fish grants them increased intelligence, letting them figure out how to break free of captivity.
- Weirdness Censor: The various humans don't seem to notice anything the fish are doing, even when they're doing things like rolling a cleaning bucket through an airport, a market, or even a crowded nightclub dance floor. Greg and Nigel are about the only ones who do notice the fish.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Wherever Barnardshire is, its citizens have English accents and UK electrical outlets, but the architecture looks somewhere between the South of France and San Francisco.
