How Fish Is Made

What the game is

The Steam store calls How Fish Is Made “a janky little jaunt through the world of surrealist storytelling”. Its longer description says you are a sardine in a machine, that it is a short narrative-driven experience about talking to fish and making choices, and that the choice every fish faces is UP or DOWN. It also credits an original song, “Little Lily Swing”, by Tri-Tachyon.

Steam lists it as single-player, with full controller support and Family Sharing. The only genre tag in the data is Indie. The store text says it is short but gives no playtime, so this page does not guess one.

Age rating: what the store data says

On the US store, the data returns a required age of 0, so there is no store age check there. The ratings block has no ESRB or PEGI entry, so no ESRB or PEGI rating was found in the store data. That is not the same as saying the game is suitable for all ages.

Three regional ratings are present. Brazil’s DEJUS rating is 14, with the descriptor Violência (violence), and that entry uses an age gate. The Steam Germany entry is 16, with the descriptor Drastische Gewalt (graphic violence). Indonesia’s IGRS entry is 18, with Kekerasan and Horor (violence, horror). The German and Indonesian entries are flagged in the data as generated.

The developer’s own content note is the plainest guide. It warns of “some graphic fish violence, trypophobia inducing imagery”, then ends with a crude joke about sexual content. The store page also lists potentially disturbing subject matter. If you are deciding for a younger player, read that note and the Brazilian 14 rating together.

Platforms, price and languages

Steam’s platform flags are Windows yes, Mac no, Linux no. The game is marked free, with no price attached. Minimum requirements are a 64-bit Windows 7, a 2.5 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM, a GeForce 470 GTX or Radeon 6870 HD class card, DirectX 10 and 750 MB of storage.

The store lists 15 languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian. Only English is marked with full audio. Steam’s data describes the Steam release only, so this page makes no claim about consoles or mobile.

The Last One and Then Another

The store description advertises “the fantastic free katamari-like DLC, The Last One and Then Another”, in which you roll up fleshy bits and other fish to “BECOME MASSIVE”. The site’s research log records it as the game’s expansion. The store data’s separate DLC field was empty when checked, so I could not confirm a separate app ID for it.

The same paragraph promises “a very special appearance from MOUTHWASHING’s very own Captain Curly”. That is the most direct link between the two games that the store itself states.

How it relates to Mouthwashing

Both games come from Wrong Organ, which the community wiki describes as a Swedish studio, and the How Fish Is Made listing names Wrong Organ and Critical Reflex as publishers. Critical Reflex also publishes Mouthwashing. How Fish Is Made came out on 14 Jan 2022; Mouthwashing followed on Steam on 26 Sep 2024.

The developer credits on Steam are Wrong Organ, Johanna Kasurinen, Jeffrey Tomec and Martin Halldin. The community wiki names Halldin as Wrong Organ’s audio lead and the voice of Polle in Mouthwashing. Nothing in the store text presents How Fish Is Made as a prequel; the shared threads are the studio, the publisher, part of the team and the Curly cameo.