This is Awesome: Fish Face

Fish Face is a one button game where you play a mythical beastie in a cute and perfectly formed sidescrolling arcade adventure. Pressing the action button causes you to dive into the depths; letting go causes you to rise up and leap out of the water.

It's hard not to love this game. It just does so many things right.

Firstly, it's INCREDIBLY FUN. Sashaying in and out of the water with the accompanying wave and SPLOOSH sound is deeply satisfying in and of itself (and this is why I reckon Ortolson has a cheeky splash or two at the start of his playthrough).

Having one button as the only input makes a lot of sense. It's much easier to concentrate on manipulating the unusual way the game handles vertical motion because you don't have any other controls to worry about - the horizontal motion gets taken out of your hands by the auto-scrolling screen.

The movement itself feels very fluid and natural and it's sensitive to your presses - even a light one will send Fish Face down a little way, which sets up some precision jumping and makes grabbing all the optional collectible rings a real challenge. It feels pretty silly to say this, too, but it just feels...fishesque. It's appropriate!

I find it pretty interesting to compare this to the whole mechanical situation going down in Babies Dream of Dead Worlds. BDoDW has essentially the same messing-around-the-horizontal-axis mechanic but in that game it feels clunky and sometimes quite annoying. You never get the same great sense of freedom slingshotting the axis as you do in Fish Face, largely because in BDoDW you're interrupted by some terrain or other pretty frequently and forced to halt your flight.


Fish Face also sports some great level design and has some very sensibe ideas which stop the game from being annoying and keep the whole thing enjoyable throughout.

There is a liberal peppering of save points (blue rings) which will restore your fish, even on the Radically Difficult Course. This means that you never get too fed up with one long section, plus there's only a fraction of time between dying and being able to try again, which (like Star Guard) keeps you more fully immersed in the experience. And, when you do die (and you will), Fish Face will leave behind a little skeleton which acts as a visual warning for your next attempt. This is mostly helpful, although in some extreme cases it also acts a mocking indictment of just how pants you are at one particular section....


There are often lots of subtle clues hidden in the terrain suggesting how you should proceed. At one point in the Radical Difficulty course you have a choice between trying to make what looks like an impossibly steep jump or rise through a small crack in the sea floor. There are, however, two shaded purple tiles next to the jump - and if Fish Face passes through these when zie is rising through the water, you'll land it without a scratch.

Speaking of which, I ALSO really dig how the Easy Course acts as a perfect tutorial for the rest of the game. It does this, not explicitly through BIG BOOMING TEXT AND DEPICTIONS OF BUTTONS but through the placement of in-game objects and a very incremental tightening of the difficulty.

For example: the first set of rings you encounter are laid out in a horizontal line. You can get the first ring by diving straight down - but to get all the rings you have to tap the action button lightly to stay at the same level without leaping back up to the surface again. This comes in handy a lot later on, especially during the hardest level. The next two sets of rings are sharp arcs leading out of the water and back in again - these give you an idea of how jumping works, and how much you need to depress Fish Face in the water to get hir to jump to the right height. Jumping correctly lets you gather all the rings.

You encounter your first set of dynamic hazards on the Easy Course, too - huge, slow, grey jellyfish which bob up and down. These sorta foreshadow the much faster and deadlier stone blocks you get at the end of Normal Course, but also teach you an important thing about the dynamic hazards in Fish Face - because you can't move left or right, what really matters is being able to work out where the enemy will be vertically when you scroll onto it. This sounds dreadfully simple but it takes some getting used to the first couple of times, and gets trickier as the enemies get smaller and more devious.


Finally, the final part of Easy Course has a 'boss' - a wily fisherman who's taken a rather worrying fancy to you (though how could you bring yourself to eat a fish with a face, I mean, honestly). He's not too much of a threat, but he does prepare you for 'bosses' in the other two levels, specifically, that they will change the established format of the level in some way (the fisherman makes it so that you can't jump out of the water for long stretches at a time).

All of this is really super shiny, and did I mention this game was FUN? Aside from the enjoyable mechanics on offer, there's this great atmosphere of playfulness to the whole thing, in the chunky chiptune music and nostalgic yet cartoony sprites, but also in the 'rewards' you get for completing levels under better conditions (from sandwiches to hugs to patronising pats on the head).

Furthermore, the little stories behind each level, though implicit and simple - you're saving a community of fish from a grizzled fisherman who sits staring into the rain for his prey, or rescuing the enchained cephalopod princess from her prison deep within the darkest part of an ancient ammonite cave - are surprisingly compelling. Are the other fish all hiding out in their home, waiting for the fisherman to go away? Who locked the princess in the cave to begin with?

These stories are supported by a varied cast of enemies and the changing landscapes of each level - which reminded me of the same great feeling of vibrancy and discovery I got when playing through some other awesome sidescrolling games back when I was a kid (specifically, world 2 of Apidya).

There's so much that's well done here - mechanics, design, story, atmosphere - all compacted into this brief one-button game.

This is awesome.