Have You Played... Fishy?

It’s strange to go back to a game you vividly remember playing when you were ten. Sat in front of your primary school’s computers, cannily placed to give visitors the impression we were modern and hip. Whiling away a lonely lunchtime, eating progressively bigger fish in Fishy.

Fishy is as simple as it is compelling. You’re a small fish, eating even smaller fish so you can become a bigger fish. Repeat, until you can splish about the whole screen chewing through monstrous carp that would have had ya twenty minutes ago.

Direct connections with your ten-year-old self are hard to come by, at least for people with memories as scatty as mine. I remember his exact frustration. His realisation that patience was key, that each time his stomach grew too big for his eyes he had to go right back to the start. His utter failure to learn from each time he got too greedy.

You wind up thinking about other things, too. About how so many of your insecurities are more complicated iterations of what came before. Then you wind up thinking about the future. If I play Mordhau in a decade or two, what am I going to be thinking about then?