I won’t dive into why this is happening to me at the moment, you’ll either need to pay me £20 or let me pay you to be my therapist to get that explanation, but I’ve been having some odd dreams lately. They’re frequently temporally confused, mixing and matching people from across my life that should never have crossed paths. This has left me looking to ground myself a touch, so of course I decided to take a look at Invisum Piscium 嫌魚, a walking sim that’s not quite about dreaming, but is about looking for distilled water that’s free from fish sex contamination.

Invisum Piscium 嫌魚 is upfront about what it is on its Steam page. Atmosphere and exploration come first, there are “almost no traditional puzzle elements,” you can pick up items and use them to “subtly alter the world.” There’s no question about this in the demo either. It opens in a bathroom, a rubber duck in front of you on the side of the bath. Of course you interact with the rubber duck, and it speaks back to you.

You leave the bathroom and find the main room in the apartment, a woman that looks like a plush doll brought to life starts talking to you about how she’s losing her mind over the fact that fish mate in water, so she’s feeling anxious about drinking it and asks for some distilled water. The quest begins! What follows in the demo, the process of getting to its ending (which does not see you acquire the distilled water) reminds me of the trading sequence in Link’s Awakening, albeit in a smaller scale.

A depressed goth with a cat plush gives you a cake. She feels empty. You give the cake to a bunny girl, and she explodes and dies, so you bring her back to life with an energy drink. You find some money, so you buy a snack, and give it to the goth, and the exchange of miscellaneous goods continues. Ghosts float around the apartment complex you find yourself in with the goth and bunny girl, spouting cryptic messages. In the distance you can see the clouds, the corners of the skybox as clear as day and you wonder what the limits of this world are.

The demo for Invisum Piscium 嫌魚 isn’t all that long, and it’s not clear how big the full game would be. It certainly feels like it sits in conversation with indie classic Yume Nikki, and more recent games like nophenia. How far we’ll all be lulled into its dreamlike world is a question that’s yet to be answered. You can check out Invisum Piscium 嫌魚 for yourself on Steam.