Well, yes, obviously. Fish have pain receptors like the ones found in humans, and when they are injured, they act how you’d expect an animal in pain to act.

But consider this: we’re not fish. 

We don’t know what fish feel. What we can identify physiologically as pain in a fish’s body might not be expressed that way in their minds. Maybe fish pain feels different from human pain.

And consider this: maybe we don’t care.

Humans as a species have a reputation for treating other animals like playthings. We eat them en masse, experiment on them, dress them up and keep them as pets. We grind their bodies in large metal machines, keep them locked in cages and pens. We manipulate them as we see fit. 

Maybe, to a fish, we are a race of uncaring, unfeeling gods.

In How Fish is Made (2022, Wrong Organ), you play as, quite literally, a fish out of water who must make its way through a mysterious, pixelated landscape that walks the line between cold, unfeeling machine and graphic, fleshy human organ. As you traverse through the machine’s disgustingly rendered belly, you encounter other fish, who seem to have only one question for you: are you going UP or DOWN? You must answer every fish, but, interestingly, you can change your answer at will— the game doesn’t make you commit to your choice until the final room.

The mechanics of the game for the PC are relatively simple. You use your arrow keys to move forward and backward, your mouse to rotate, and the spacebar to interact with fish. It’s also a short game, clocking in at around 30-45 minutes to complete. But despite its simplicity, this game contains a surprising amount of depth. The environment, while pretty low-poly, evokes a visceral sense of discomfort and disgust through its depictions of disturbing body horror imagery. (The example that immediately comes to mind is the lotus seed pods, which have small, beady eyes instead of seeds.) And as you inch past your surroundings, your fishy flopping is accompanied by a score of mechanical whirs and fleshy squelches enough to make skin crawl. 

The game’s driving force is its NPCs: your fellow fish. When you first crash-land into the story, you meet a large fish who presents you with a choice — UP or DOWN — that will haunt you for the rest of the game. Every fish you meet afterwards will ask you the same question, but each one has a different perspective on the issue. One fish with a bent spine preaches the gospel of UP with a maniacal intensity, while another ensnared in a ring of plastic confidently declares that DOWN is the way to go. Some fish seem almost cartoonish in their convictions, while others act more human. A fish you meet will ask you whether they should travel UP with their family, or DOWN with their best friend. “I don’t want to choose,” they squeal, “if I can’t know exactly how it will turn out!”

At its core, How Fish Is Made breaks the human experience down to its most basic component: choice. And yet, when playing, you’ll notice that there are no humans in sight, only fish. However, there is a distinct human presence that remains unspoken. In one room, human voices play from distant recordings. The lights and buttons you find in the different rooms are fully functional, installed (presumably) by a human. In one of the most quietly disturbing moments of the game, you find one fish dead, trapped inside a condom filled with an unsavory white goo.

It’s interesting, then, that this game is about choice. As I mentioned before, humans typically remove most elements of choice from the life of a fish; we act almost like gods. So if humans are gods to fish, able to manipulate them at will, then perhaps the choices a fish makes in its lifetime are essentially meaningless. Whether it is eaten, used for testing, or kept as a pet, every fish ends up the same way: dead. Does it matter what the fish chooses to do in the meantime?

I fell in love with this game not because of its striking graphics, easy gameplay, or clever dialogue, but because of the way it considers the emptiness of choice. As soon as you are presented with the game’s central question — UP or DOWN? — you know that it doesn’t really matter which way you go. It’s not as if one path leads to death and the other salvation; this isn’t that type of game. You don’t get to choose if you die, you just get to choose how. You’re a fish.

In How Fish Is Made’s most memorable cutscene, a dancing parasite (I promise, this makes more sense in context) sings a song to you in front of pictures of decaying flesh and wriggling bugs. In the middle of his slideshow, he shows you a picture of a heap of dead fish in a cannery. On top, text reads: “Do Fish Feel Pain?” For the longest time, we humans didn’t think so, and we treated fish accordingly. But pain exists regardless of whether we perceive it or not.

When we picture a god of humans, we typically think of it as resembling ourselves. We draw them in human form, call them human names, and imagine that they understand human pain. But what if they can’t? What if the entities that control our fates, that make our choices virtually worthless, don’t understand the pain of deliberation that goes into making a decision? What if they exist only to use us while we live, harvest us when we die, and make our bodies into the filling of a delicious sandwich? 

What if they don’t know — or don’t care — How Fish Is Made?

The post Ethical Gaming: Choices, God, and “How Fish Is Made” appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I’ve been an active member of the Rusty Lake community for a little over a year now, and every time I play, I’m stunned by just how much depth the creators are able to fit into their games, which usually only take anywhere from an hour to four hours to play. Particularly, I’m fascinated by the games’ takes on environmentalism and mental health, both of which are central elements of the games’ setting and story. I’ve spent hours writing and theorizing, and come to the conclusion that the series lends itself as an ecocentrist, the perspective that nature’s needs outweigh human ones.

In an effort to ensure that my year long trip down the Rusty Lake rabbit hole was not in vain, I wanted to explain my thoughts on the deeper message behind the game series. There are spoilers ahead.

There are multiple interconnected plotlines within the Rusty Lake universe, but the linchpin of the franchise is the story of Dale Vandermeer, a detective investigating a death within the Rusty Lake Mental Health and Fishing facility, which sits atop the titular Rusty Lake. The deceased, a woman named Laura Vanderboom, died under mysterious and possibly supernatural circumstances. While attempting to investigate, Dale encounters a handful of chilling characters, including half-human, half-animal hybrids Mr. Owl and Mr. Crow, a parrot named Harvey, and a human-shaped “corrupted soul” with no name and undefined intentions. Later installments of the game allow the player to take on different playable characters and explore different storylines, some of which take place several centuries in the past.

One of the central plot devices of the story is the Elixir, a concoction made by alchemist Caroline Eilander in Rusty Lake: Paradise that created the human animal hybrids Dale interacts with in his games. The Elixir, created through the magical powers of the Lake, works only when two parties drink it. One dies, and one becomes semi-immortal, taking on the form of a hybrid. 

In line with the games’ ecocentrist themes, the Elixir seems to represent human corruption and the exploitation of nature for selfish ends. Not only was the Elixir made by harvesting the power of the Lake, an act that mirrors humanity’s own misuse of natural resources, but is also almost exclusively used without one party’s consent. In one case, that party was a dog, who James Vanderboom drugged in Rusty Lake: Roots in order to attempt to become immortal himself. This backfired on him spectacularly, as the dog ended up becoming fully immortal. This was while James kicked the bucket.

The way this plot point plays out reads to me as Rusty Lake’s satirical critique of human hubris. Animals have been around long before humans, and they will continue to exist long after we die. This may also explain why James’ dog is the only character that becomes fully immortal after taking the Elixir. Both Mr. Owl and Mr. Crow, who were once humans, express the desire to retake it at some point in order to renew its effects.

This isn’t even to mention the fact that “corrupted souls” as seen in Dale’s games, are later shown to be the remains of people who drink the Elixir and die. To me, this feels as if the Lake has corrupted their souls as a physical manifestation of the human corruption that led to their deaths. In fact, natural manifestations of human greed seem to be a recurring motif within the games. The ultimate example, the biblical Ten Plagues of Egypt, is used as a framing device in Rusty Lake: Paradise, which is also the game that introduces the Elixir.

The games’ ecocentric views also tie into its portrayal of mental health, which starts with Laura Vanderboom from the first games. Laura is shown to struggle with severe mental illness. She attempts to reconnect with nature at the Lake in order to regain some sense of normalcy, and the games frequently use nature based metaphors as an abstract representation of her depression. The game Rusty Lake: Seasons is entirely built around this concept, using seasons, as the name would imply, to represent Laura’s mental states and subsequent descent into depression. Laura is also often shown in pictures next to a cherry tree. This gains more significance in the game Underground Blossom, where Laura literally blossoms into a cherry tree. In this game, “blossoming” is used to represent a purification of the soul and Laura’s ascension from her mental turmoil. 

Laura’s story hints at the connection between the series’ views on nature and mental health. Laura comes to the Lake to mitigate her depression by engaging with nature, and the end to her story suggests that she ended up doing just that. Only by becoming a part of nature was Laura able to make peace with her trauma and escape her depression. 

Her story also marks a notable contrast between how the games treat engaging with nature in a mutually beneficial way versus doing it for one’s own gain. Laura never seeks to exploit the Lake in any way, just to engage with its aesthetic beauty in order to improve her mental state. James Vanderboom, however, seeks to misuse the Lake’s resources to gain immortality and ends up paying for it. Both within the Rusty Lake universe and in real life, there is a difference between enjoying an area’s ecosystem services and overexploitation.

There are so many other aspects of Rusty Lake that I wish I had time to discuss, but my space at the moment is limited. So, thank you for humoring me. I urge you to try these games for yourself, many of which are free to play. Feel free to come back with your own conclusions about the games and prove me wrong. As Mr. Crow would say: You know what to do.

The post The Environmentalist Message Behind “Rusty Lake” appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I’ve played three FromSoftware games; Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. All three are masterpieces in their own right. Elden Ring was the most fun the first time through, but Bloodborne is the one I keep coming back to. It has less variety than Elden Ring and less freedom, however these things work to Bloodborne’s advantage. Because of the smaller scale of its campaign, they can capitalize on linearity, and make the combat, story, and aesthetics much more polished. That being said, quality is not valued over quantity in the gaming industry today, which is why Elden Ring won Game of the Year and Bloodborne did not. In this first edition of Ethical Gaming Journalism Reviews, I want to talk about why Bloodborne is the pinnacle of the souls-like genre for me, and why a remaster or sequel of the game would be lucrative.

Saw Clever (left) and Boom Hammer (right). Images via Fextralife

The combat of Bloodborne is incredibly fun, and the most technically impressive up until that point. The classic souls-like dodge roll is traded out for a quick side-step. When you get hit, you can deal damage to get some of that health back within a certain amount of time. There are over twenty weapons in the game. Given the dozens to hundreds of weapons in other souls-like games, this doesn’t sound like much. However, every weapon has two modes called transformed and untransformed. Transforming a weapon can vary from simply making a weapon longer, like with the Saw Cleaver, to adding a fire buff like with the Boom Hammer. These transformed move sets are also able to be combined into normal moves and vice versa.

On top of this, Bloodborne has guns. They do poor damage, but they allow players to parry enemies. This opens them up for a visceral attack. Instead of just stabbing your sword into them, you shove your hand into their body, and then pull it out, aggressively. That’s the main theme of Bloodborne’s combat; aggression. While souls-like games often encourage waiting and timing your attacks, the game wants you to learn the move sets and rewards your efforts by allowing you to eviscerate people. Bloodborne wants you to be powerful, and in her glory gives you the tools to do so.

That’s a nice segue into the next topic of aesthetics. This game runs like there’s a hamster wheel inside with an elderly rat on it, but that doesn’t matter in the larger picture. Within Bloodborne, Miyazaki was inspired by the gothic setting in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and by H.P. Lovecraft’s cyclopean structures, eldritch presences, and cosmic horror. This contrasts the dark fantasy locales inspired by the likes of the Japanese manga Berserk. These two ideas work so well in tandem that it’s almost absurd. The gothic structures akin to the Victorian era seem like they were built by towering gods, drawing inspiration from the Notre Dame Cathedral, Our Lady of Chartres Cathedral, and the Brussels Town Hall.

The main enemies are human citizens of Yharnam, a fictional country based on Victorian England, that are undergoing various stages of turning into werewolves. The central hub of the game, the Hunter’s Dream, functions as a workshop where you can upgrade your weapons and stats. The player character, simply referred to as “the Hunter”, is tall and slender, mainly to emphasize the giant prey slaughtering weapons they’re granted. The weapons are not only large but absurd. The main weapon on the cover is aptly named the Saw Cleaver, which is a saw that, well, it turns into a cleaver. My favorite weapon in the game is the Boom Hammer. It’s hard to explain that one. Every design choice is intentional in Bloodborne, from the Cleric Beast having one arm larger than the other, to the text after you kill a boss being “prey slaughtered,” instead of “enemy slain.” 

Fans have been begging for a remake or remaster, or anything at all Bloodborne related for years. From the Insomniac/Sony leak a couple of months ago, we found out that the game has sold about seven and a half million copies. With the success of Elden Ring, I think a Bloodborne remake or even a sequel would be incredibly successful. It would be the perfect chance to sand down some of the rough edges and improve upon a formula FromSoftware has been working with for over a decade. Unfortunately, the game studio is owned by Sony. No matter how many fans demand it, if Sony says no, that’s it. However, something Bloodborne related could come soon. Even Sony can’t deny the appeal forever.

The post Insights into Miyazaki’s Magnum Opus “Bloodborne” appeared first on KRUI Radio.