I Am Fish (Xbox Series X)

I Am Fish isn’t a fish out of water story, it’s a story of fish desperately trying to find what little water they can as they must cross swathes of dry land to make it to the ocean. Spend a few too many seconds in dry air and the fish will shrivel up, and with I Am Fish deliberately making movement difficult, you can bet that you’ll often see your fish die despite the game having such a cute and friendly face.

 

I Am Fish is the sequel to Bossa Studios’s deliberately frustrating I Am Bread, both of them physics-focused 3D platformers where the controls are meant put up as much a fight as the environment. In I Am Fish though, you are given the option on how hard things will be exactly, the player getting to choose if they’d like to play with some fairly intuitive controls where you move your control stick where you wish for your fish to go or a more difficult play style where you must more realistically imitate a fish’s swimming method by moving the control stick left and right to propel yourself forward. You can acclimate to the more unusual control style with some time spent with it, but I Am Fish doesn’t need that harder option to still put up quite a fight. When your fish are navigating across dry land they’ll often find themselves in an object like a plugged up fish bowl, a jar, or the water cart of a janitor. You still only control your fish in these scenarios but need to move the container you’re in around, often needing to ram your face into the right parts of it to get it moving in the direction you desire. Adjusting its angle and speed are incredibly important as well as it’s easy for these containers to break or spill and send your fish out to flop on dry land for a quick death, and the levels of I Am Fish are deviously designed so that you can almost feel like you’re walking a tight rope simply to cross a few feet of ground due to the drops and hazards present to burst your bubble.

I Am Fish kicks off with a reference to its predecessor, a special loaf of living bread ending up fish food at a pet shop. The four lucky fish in the tank to eat some of it, a goldfish, piranha, pufferfish, and flying fish, find that consuming the bread crumbs gives them a bit more intelligence and a realization they’d rather live at sea than in captivity. Before they can even conceive of an escape plan though, the three more exotic fish are all bought and taken across town, the goldfish now on its own but motivated to reunite its friends and make it out into the ocean. At different points in the game you will play as each of the four fish, each of them getting three stages each with a finale stage to cap things off. Three stages per fish likely sounds rather small, but because of the precision movement required and the actual size of the stages, you can end up spending half an hour just trying to finish a single level. There are checkpoints throughout a stage so you can afford to fail and the detection on these checkpoints is quite generous meaning even if you’re not quite close to them you’ll usually still trigger them as you pass. This is notable because in other areas of the game I Am Fish wants pinpoint accuracy, the collectable bread crumbs hidden through each stage requiring direct contact to grab and often placed in areas where it can be quite easy to just barely miss them if you don’t angle yourself right. Luckily, you can die as much as you need to, although levels do have star ratings for doing them quickly and with few failures that go towards unlocking a unique bonus stage.

 

I Am Fish’s massive levels are certainly suitable obstacle courses to navigate in whatever your fish finds itself in. Sometimes your fish will be allowed to move through water freely but they’ll still find themselves thrown into containers as their only way to traverse long stretches of land. The shape this takes varies wildly and even what you ride in can get in quite creative. You’ll find yourself rolling around an active nightclub trying to avoid getting trampled while over at the hospital the piranha can make itself some room to swim by tearing open blood bags. Rolling across rooftops, flying across farmlands, navigating natural spaces and busy urban centers alike, even in a single stage you can find yourself heading to a new setting and facing some new challenges. Many levels even have wider spaces where you can try to make your own path, mutually exclusive branches having their own trials to overcome but you’re free to pursue what you think you can handle or whatever looks like the more interesting challenge.

The objects you find yourself in must be moved differently like the jar being a lot more susceptible to turning while swimming forward inside it than the fish bowl, but the different fish also have different abilities. The goldfish is admittedly the baseline, having no special power but giving you some early levels to focus on understanding the movement mechanics and general need to be precise to survive. The pufferfish though can inflate to roll outside of water for a while, giving it greater mobility and levels that often involve a lot more moving around racing your own dehydration. The flying fish instead takes to the air and can glide to cover distances, often needing to find paths from puddle to puddle or being made to do some puzzle solving or trying to quickly cross through areas that become deadly if you linger in them. The piranha is given a bite attack to set it apart, but unfortunately it’s not a particularly good one. It has incredibly short and imprecise range, and while the piranha often has interesting little scenarios where you need to tear apart a room to fill it with enough water to escape, the biting is a flimsily implemented mechanic. If you need to bite onto something that isn’t close to the safety of water it’s a gamble on how to time the bite, the animation not the most helpful and the detection for if your teeth snag sometimes leaning back towards being overly precise like when you’re trying to pick up floating bread crumbs. When even the official walkthrough videos posted by publisher Curve Digital show the piranha struggling to bite the blood bag dangling above the sink it’s clear the bite wasn’t implemented as well as it could have been, but another small issue emerges in that specific example.

 

When you’re moving around inside an object, I Am Fish is usually a fairly reliable physics platformer. You know that dropping on hard ground will shatter your container and you need to angle for softer landings. You can learn where to apply pressure to move the object as fast as you’re willing to dare. However, when you’re expected to leap out of water, things can become a bit more of a gamble. You are expected to go downward and then crest out of the water if you want more height or distance, but there are many times when seemingly similar jumps might produce different distances. A difficulty option where checkpoints are disabled seems especially masochistic to select when you realize your jumping isn’t always going to be guaranteed to work as you’d hope. With checkpoints on though this can sometimes be brushed off as you just retry from there and attempt the jump until it works, the momentum eventually lining up with whatever checks the game makes to determine your height and distance. It doesn’t make these moments any more enjoyable, and there are certainly some areas where you are expected to do too many of these in a row so that a failure leads to trying to wrangle this jumping system all over again. One of the weaker moments is unfortunately on the piranha’s shoulders again as it needs to cross a highway by leaping between potholes, the fish inevitably needing to flop some of the distance but passing cars might randomly align to hit you in a way you couldn’t have anticipated.

THE VERDICT: Mastering the movement style of a deliberately frustrating game is part of the challenge and I Am Fish keeps throwing new scenarios at you that test your precision while being thematically unique or interesting. It’s easy to shrug and accept you didn’t do the right movements when your bowl rolls off an edge, but those moments where randomization or the awkward jumping momentum come into play wear down a pretty creative and challenging experience. The different fish abilities do keep things varied in addition to the different containers the four escapist fish find themselves in, but having even a few rough edges can undermine a game where everything needs to work smoothly in order for the deadly tightrope walks navigation involves to feel fair and compelling.

 

And so, I give I Am Fish for Xbox Series X…

An OKAY rating. You can really feel when I Am Fish is fighting back against you in the wrong way, making the moments where a concept hinges a bit too much on the rough jumping too present to brush off in favor of the many moments of imaginative action. The segments where you’re on the edge of your seat constantly brushing against the threat of careening off an edge to your death are worthy challenges that are gratifying to overcome, the game only rarely giving you a bit of a leniency in how something unfolds and that’s usually to make sure something like a trampoline actually bounces you towards the intended destination properly. Each of the fish start with some mundane but interesting level concepts that grow into more involved and interesting settings where you often get to pick your path so that a game that otherwise requires spot-on movement can also provide a sense of freedom and control. In fact, those moments where the jumping momentum or random hazards feel too present are often at bottlenecks where an alternate route could have given players ways to avoid trying until it works. The frustration thankfully never sinks so far in that it discourages you from powering through, and while a few larger levels do feel like they’re a bit too big, they also have smart checkpoint placement to segment them and a good degree of variety within that large space. The piranha’s ability needs some cleaning up for those moments where it needs to jump and bite, but otherwise the flying fish movement is appropriately touchy but responsive and the pufferfish is surprisingly easy. The learning process for how to move in new situations is often not too complex too so you can start focusing on tackling the obstacles ahead fairly quickly.

 

If I Am Fish got its jumping momentum in line though, it would quite easily earn a Good rating because there is a lot of appeal to the level design and scenarios for this style of play. It is challenging but interesting to overcome, and when a puzzle or segment is annoying at present, it is because it rubs up against that out-of-water movement issue. Its amusing concepts can make pushing through those weaker moments worth it still, I Am Fish not just resting on unusual controls to give its challenges substance. With some wacky humor and odd lore underlying it too, it certainly holds your interest well, that often making it easier to push through moments of legitimate brutal toughness and accidental roughness alike.