Content warning: How Fish Is Made includes disturbing horror imagery, fish violence, trypophobia-triggering visuals, and sexual content. This guide keeps those elements non-graphic and focuses on how to approach the game.
How Fish Is Made is short, strange, and intentionally uncomfortable. You are not preparing for a combat gauntlet, a puzzle box, or a branching adventure with hidden stats. You are guiding a sardine through an oppressive machine, listening to other fish explain themselves, and deciding how to respond to the pressure around one repeated question: up or down?
That makes the best first playthrough slower than the runtime suggests. The movement is awkward on purpose, the conversations carry most of the experience, and the atmosphere does more work than any traditional challenge. If you rush because the game looks simple, you can still reach the end, but you will flatten the parts that make it land.
Essential Tips
1. Accept the Sardine Movement
The first skill is patience with the body you are given. Your fish does not move like a clean platforming character, and that clumsy flop is part of the point. Use small course corrections instead of trying to sprint through every corridor. When the body catches on an edge, back up, turn slightly, and approach again.
Treat the controls as a tone-setter rather than a problem to overpower. The game wants you to feel low, wet, and trapped inside machinery. Once you stop fighting for graceful movement, navigation becomes less frustrating and the mood becomes easier to read.
2. Talk Before You Decide
The conversations are the main progression texture. Other fish are not just flavor lines scattered through a hallway; they build the pressure around the central choice. Speak to each one you can reach, then let the answer sit for a moment before moving on.
Some characters frame their own direction as obvious. Others sound frightened, resigned, persuasive, or absurd. You do not need to solve them like quest givers. Listen for how they justify themselves, because the game is more interested in the way choices are explained than in rewarding one correct route.
3. Keep Your First Run Spoiler-Light
How Fish Is Made works best when you do not know every image or turn in advance. It is short enough that a blind run is not a risky time investment, and the experience depends heavily on surprise, discomfort, and repetition.
Use this guide for approach rather than step-by-step routing. Move forward, speak to fish, observe how the machine changes, and make the up-or-down decision in the headspace the game gives you. After credits, a replay or video can satisfy curiosity about missed details without weakening the first pass.
4. Treat Up or Down as a Roleplay Prompt
Do not look at the central question like a stat check. The game repeatedly asks whether you are going up or down, but the useful play is asking why your fish would answer that way. Are you choosing out of optimism, spite, obedience, fear, curiosity, or because someone else sounded certain?
Pick a line of thinking and follow it. Even if the final result does not behave like a typical branching ending, your internal reason changes how the conversations feel. A consistent answer can make the journey sharper than swapping directions just to test what happens.
5. Notice the Fish Around the Path
The machine is full of characters who are stuck, damaged, self-important, frightened, or desperate to be believed. Pay attention to who can still move, who cannot, who asks something of you, and who seems certain about the same choice you are still considering.
This is not a game where every interaction becomes a visible quest marker. The payoff is usually emotional or thematic. If someone is trapped or caught in a horrible place, the detail matters even when it does not unlock a reward.
6. Use the Atmosphere as Navigation
Because the spaces are grimy and tight, it can be tempting to stare only at the floor and push forward. Instead, scan for motion, light, openings, and changes in sound. The machine often tells you where to go by narrowing your options, but you still need to read the scene.
When you feel lost, slow down and rotate the camera or fish until the available passage is clear. Most confusion comes from moving too fast through a visually busy space. Let each room settle before forcing your way onward.
7. Prepare for Abrupt Tone Swings
The game can move from funny to grotesque to oddly sincere without much warning. That whiplash is deliberate. Do not assume a silly line means the next moment will stay light, and do not assume a grim scene means there is no humor inside it.
If you are sensitive to body horror, holes or clustered imagery, or sexual references, take the warning seriously before starting. A short game can still be intense when it stacks sound, texture, and trapped movement together.
8. Do Not Expect Combat or Fail States
Your goal is not to master enemies, collect gear, or optimize a build. Most of the play is moving, listening, and continuing through the machine. That makes the game approachable for players who do not usually play horror, but it also means action-game habits can make it feel thinner than it is.
Look for meaning in pacing and interaction instead of challenge. If a section feels mechanically simple, ask what the simplicity is doing to your sense of control.
9. Replay Only After You Finish Once
A second run is useful because the conversations land differently when you already understand the shape of the journey. You can test another mindset, read lines you skimmed, and pay closer attention to how characters describe their reasons.
Still, finish once before dissecting. The first run is the only time the machine can fully surprise you, and How Fish Is Made is built around that first strange descent through its logic.
10. Play the Expansion as Its Own Joke
The Last One and Then Another is a free extra mode with a rolling, absorption-focused structure. It is connected to the same strange world, but it plays differently from the base sardine walk and should not be treated as the same kind of first-playthrough guide problem.
Finish the base game first, then enter the extra mode expecting a more openly absurd physical escalation. The shift works better when you have already sat with the slower conversations and the up-or-down framing.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
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Do not rush every hallway - The game is short, but its best moments come from reading the room, listening to fish, and letting the machine feel oppressive.
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Do not treat awkward movement as accidental failure - The flop is part of the experience, so adjust gently instead of fighting for precise action-game control.
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Do not skip conversations on a first run - Dialogue is the main way the game builds its choice, humor, and dread.
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Do not hunt for a clean good ending immediately - The up-or-down question is more useful as a reflection of your reasoning than as a normal reward fork.
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Do not ignore the content warning - The short runtime does not make the imagery or subject matter harmless for every player.
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Do not expect puzzles to carry the game - Movement and interpretation matter more than inventory logic, combat skill, or route optimization.
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Do not open the expansion first - The bonus mode is better after the base game establishes the tone and central question.
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Do not flatten every fish into a hint dispenser - Characters matter even when they are not giving instructions.
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Do not overexplain the first run while playing - Let the discomfort work before you turn it into a theory.
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Do not assume another player’s reaction should be yours - The game is brief and interpretive, so your own reason for choosing matters.
Summary
| Category | Top Tip |
|---|---|
| Movement | Make small corrections and let the awkward body set the tone |
| Dialogue | Speak to every reachable fish before committing to an interpretation |
| Choice | Treat up or down as a roleplay question, not a puzzle answer |
| Pacing | Slow down enough for rooms, sounds, and character lines to register |
| Horror | Take the imagery warning seriously before starting |
| Replay | Finish once blind, then revisit for alternate readings |
| Expansion | Save The Last One and Then Another until after the base game |
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5 checked for this guideEvery factual claim in this guide was checked against at least two independent sources before publication. These are the references used for How Fish Is Made.
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