

I turned the camera around to see him, a farmer's hat perched on top of a monstrous tangle of limbs. I held in and released my breath so tightly, I emitted sound at a frequency only cats can hear, which is the last thing I want. I cursed the park for being geologically unsound. What ensued was a terrifying chase sequence where I hurriedly smashed my golden head into plastic to shimmy the bucket along. they are nothing on the man wearing a farmer's hat. Resident Evil Village's Lady Dimitrescu, Silent Hill's Pyramid Head, the many grim giants in Dark Souls.

But no, this guy had given up cleaning his car to snuff the life out of a fish in a bucket. It would be the best thing I'd ever witnessed. It wasn't set dressing at all! It was an actual human who wanted to murder a nice fish! What sort of person would do that?! If I saw a goldfish in a mop bucket rolling down a park, I'd watch with glee. So I turned the camera to find the man in the farmer's hat pelting it towards me. Then that feeling struck me - that one where you instinctively know you're being watched.

"Oh, that's a nice piece of set dressing", I remember thinking to myself as I carefully navigated rocks and bumps in the grass. On my way to said park, I'd quietly rolled past a man in a farmer's hat cleaning his car and thought nothing of it. After I'd escaped the sewer system, I landed in a mop bucket and had to push myself to freedom: a swimming pool on the other side of a quaint park. This last scenario as the goldfish was the most frightening of the levels I sampled. Later, you might control a goldfish as you dodge needles in sewers. Pilot a flying fish and you'll soar across fields scanning for puddles. As a piranha you'll go from chewing a hammer and launching yourself out of a window, to tumbling down a busy country lane in a glass jar. As a puffer fish, you'll blow yourself up into a ball and career down hills in search of precious agua. Water is everything, and if you do not have it, you will have nothing, because you are dead - capiche? Every movement must be carefully considered if you are to live, whether that be rolling down a staircase at just the right speed, or flopping from the kitchen counter and into the sink. My main focus isn't on seeing the sights, but scanning them for pockets of water a pipe anything to keep my little heart beating.Īnd this impending sense of calamity saturates every subtle tweak of your fins. I'm a sucker for a place where I can buy overpriced fudge and stroll around an abbey with my arms behind my back. On the surface, the Finding Nemo extended universe I Am Fish presents is somewhere I'd normally love to visit. You've got warm fields and gentle streams, and one level had me gliding between the soggy roofs of a cute market. If anything, the ambience was rather upbeat and extremely pleasant. They were all set in an idyllic take on the English countryside where I imagine Postman Pat does the rounds and Paddington Bear goes for walks. Not that the atmosphere in I Am Fish is particularly foreboding, at least from the four early levels I sampled. Suddenly, you're all gilled up in a restrictive orb of glass, and those useful human constructs like stairs and bookshelves and roads transform into terrifying obstacles that stand between you and the hallowed H2O. This confidence melts away the moment you step into the scales of the game's four fish: a puffer fish, a flying fish, a piranha, and a goldfish. That's pretty impressive, considering I'm sitting at the top of the food chain as someone who enjoys cod and chips at the beach. So far, I Am Fish perfectly captures what I imagine it feels like to be a fish in and out of water (mainly out of water).
