Fish Fillets NG

About the game

You are in charge of two fish, a small orange one and a big blue one, and every room is a puzzle: get both of them out through the opening. The rooms are full of objects that sit on the floor, stack on each other and fall when whatever holds them up is moved away. The fish cannot pick anything up, only push it, so everything depends on the order in which you move things and which fish does the moving.

The two fish are good at different jobs. The small one can slip through gaps the big one cannot fit in, but it is too weak to shift anything heavy. The big one can push the steel pieces, but it is also the one that gets stuck. Neither survives being crushed, so a careless push ends the room, and a single wrong step can leave it unsolvable: this is a game where you stop, look at the whole room and think before touching anything. Undo and restart are always one key away.

A thin story runs through the rooms: the fish find a mysterious message and set off through a sunken house, ship wrecks, a pirate ship, a city in the deep, a crashed flying saucer, a coral reef and a treasure cave, trading jokes all the way. Fish Fillets was made by the Czech studio ALTAR interactive in 1998 and released as free software in 2004. This is the Next Generation version, the free engine that grew from it, with extra rooms by volunteers and translations of the text into many languages.

Playing it here

The game is compiled from its source code to run in your browser, and the first start downloads about 60 MB. Your solved levels, saved games and settings are stored in this browser; clearing this site's data deletes them. Two things differ from the original package. The spoken dialogs were recorded in Czech and Dutch, and those recordings are left out to keep the download small, so the fish are silent and you read the subtitles instead (in English by default; you can pick another language in the options). And six joke rooms in a secret branch, which imitate other companies' games and products, were removed.

Click the game once so it receives the keyboard.

Controls

Getting started

Look before you push. Work out where each object will end up before you move anything. A pipe pushed one square too far cannot be pushed back, and that is what the restart key is for.

Use both fish. When one fish is stuck, switch to the other: very often the small fish has to go in first, to a place only it can reach, so that the big one can do the pushing from outside.

Learn the rules of weight. The big fish can push steel that the small one cannot move, and the small one fits where the big one does not. The first rooms teach this slowly, one idea at a time.

Tips

Watch what falls. Objects drop as soon as what held them is gone, and a falling object can land on a fish. Check the squares below a stack before you take its support away.

Count your moves. The move counter (F5) is how the game compares solutions: the best known ones are very short, and trying to beat your own count teaches you the room.

Restart freely. Restarting a room costs nothing, and a failed try shows you how the room behaves.

Credits

Fish Fillets was created by ALTAR interactive (1998). Fish Fillets - Next Generation: engine by Ivo Danihelka; level data and documentation by Pavel Danihelka; many new levels and the undo by Mirek Olsak; translations by volunteers, credited in the licence file. The game's fonts are from the GNU FreeFont project.