Day 39 - Fish Fillets 2
Puzzle, Nightmare Fuel, Nudity ·
Sam’s Take:
I wasn’t sure what we were getting into with this one. The logo looks like an X-File parody, and the terrifying human-fish hybrid faces make me scream. Looking at the Steam screenshots I assumed it was a 2-D platformer deal and picked it up. Turns out it’s a spy/thriller parody puzzle game?
The opening cutscene shows the fish getting their mission from a screen on a fake mine in an abandoned mine field that reveals that the younger brother of King Crap (rap-star millionaire crab) is missing. The scene is loaded with c-tier fish puns (SEA-TIER FISH PUNS!) and tired spy tropes.
Maybe it’s explained more in the first game, but why do these two dopes get this mission? They don’t seem like secret agents. Their dialogue isn’t spy-like… they seem like regular buffoons. I mean look at them:
When the gameplay starts proper, you go through a tutorial, where you get a lot of meta jokes about being in game, such as bantering about pressing “R” to restart if you get into an unwinnable scenario. The tutorial also taught you that the fish can die if something falls on top of them, but they just laugh off death, reminding you that you can just back up a step with the backspace button.
At this point I couldn’t say I was on board. There were two barely defined characters in a nonsense spy scenario pushing pipes around a van. None of the humor was landing, and I was about ready to stop, but decided to play at least one real level after the tutorial.
Then.. the most unexpected thing happened… the puzzle fucking slapped. It’s the classic puzzle game success story, very few mechanics, but a lot of layered uses (depth pun unintentional). Through a wild combination of exchanging the hammer back and forth between the two fish in such a way that it wouldn’t fall and kill them, we got the hammer in between the bus and the ray and pushed it to wedge him off the van and to the ocean floor. It’s not the hardest puzzle (this is level one after all), but even here I had multiple instances of making a mistake, but then immediately realizing “oh! I can do this actually” and backing up/correcting.
I’ve done a little more research now, and it sounds like there was an active online level-editing scene for this game, and there are other characters you unlock with more abilities. I’m going to take a wild guess and say Skeeter will not be into this. Nothing really works outside of the puzzles, and Skeeter isn’t anti-puzzle, but he’s not quite the puzzle-pervert that I am. I’m not totally sure if we’ll play this again on the site (can’t wait to see what you say Skeeter!) but I’m about to mute this sound, put on a podcast and go to town on these 112 levels of fish puzzles.
Recommend: I recommend to me
Replay Percentage Chance: 40%
Time Played: 30 Minutes
Skeeter’s Take:
I’m probably going to echo a lot of what Sam had to say about this game, up until a point where we will drastically deviate.
I get the humor they were going for here, and stylistically the game nails the tone it’s trying to set. However, as Sam said, it never really “landed”. I think what initially put me off was the amount of talking the two fish leads would do. And, while I’m sure the stiff voice acting is intentionally camp, there’s a fine line for me between fun and just mildly irritating. Thankfully after a quick settings crawl, I found the holy grail:
This helped tremendously with my enjoyment of Fish Filets 2 - You can still read the fish subtitles so you aren’t missing out on any story or direction.
After turning off the distractions, I could focus on the puzzle aspects. To be honest, this game feels like it would be a good puzzle game. What I mean by “feels” like (since that really couldn’t be more vague) is it introduces simple mechanics that probably won’t change much throughout the game, and those simple mechanics cohesively add a lot of depth with how they interact with each other. For example, the two controllable characters each have their differences. The small orange fish can fit through small spaces, and has more maneuverability, whereas the big fat blue fish can move heavy pipes and objects the smaller one can’t. Those mechanics probably won’t change throughout, I would guess, unless something in the puzzle environment allowed it to change. Fish Filets 2 seems like it has a surprising amount of depth, despite its goofy first impressions.
However, here is where Sam and I deviate - when I got to this screen:
Instead of thinking, “Oh, cool, can’t wait to check this out and dive into these puzzles!” I thought, “Mmm, naw. Fuck that, no thank you.” and closed the game.
Here’s the tough thing about these reviews; often we are playing games that, like this one (or Off Peak), are genuinely good games. But like this game (and Off Peak), they fall into a genre I am not really all that interested in, or they don’t click with me, or I just don’t enjoy it.
The self-imposed rubric we have set in place here is, “Would I recommend this game?”. For me, for Fish Fillets 2, 9/10 that answer would be “no”.
That 1/10 time would be me recommending this to Sam.
Recommend: Sam, I think you would like this game.
Replay Percentage Chance: 20%
Time Played: 30 mins
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