Call Me Skyfish

Call Me Skyfish is a humorous 2D side-scrolling platform adventure where players control Skyfish, an angry orange fish armed with bubble-shooting abilities and a tongue-swinging mechanic. The game features a whimsical setting filled with absurd enemies including his ex-girlfriend, floating heads, tsunamis, screaming cats, and a radioactive stick-figure hedgehog. This indie title offers old-school run-and-gun platforming action combined with unique tongue-swinging traversal, delivering a laid-back and silly gaming experience for fans of quirky indie platformers.

Call Me Skyfish: A Forgotten Relic of the Xbox Live Indie Games Graveyard

In the vast and ever-expanding ecosystem of video games, history is written by the blockbusters, the masterpieces, and the infamous failures. But what of the games that simply… existed? The ones that slipped onto digital storefronts with little fanfare, were met with a collective shrug, and faded into the data streams, remembered only by the most dedicated archivists? Call Me Skyfish is one such artifact. Developed and published by the enigmatic Uplion, this 2011 Xbox Live Indie Game (later ported to Steam in 2017) is less a game to be reviewed and more a digital curiosity to be excavated. It stands as a stark, almost perfect, representative of a bygone era of digital distribution—a time of boundless creativity and, just as often, bewildering ambition untethered from technical execution.

Development History & Context

To understand Call Me Skyfish is to first understand the platform that birthed it: the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) channel. Launched in 2008, XBLIG was Microsoft’s ambitious, if flawed, attempt to democratize game development for the Xbox 360. For a small annual fee, anyone with a PC and a copy of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio could create, publish, and sell their game on the Xbox Live Marketplace. This led to an explosion of content, from genuine indie gems like I Made a Game with Zombies in It to a deluge of low-effort clones, joke games, and bizarre experiments.

Into this chaotic digital bazaar stepped Uplion. The studio, essentially a one-or-two-person operation shrouded in mystery, appeared to operate on the fringes of this ecosystem. The development history of Call Me Skyfish is opaque, but the game itself tells its own story. It was a product of its technological constraints: the XNA framework and the size limits imposed on XBLIG titles. The game’s 2D side-scrolling, platforming nature was a direct result of these limitations, a common choice for developers working within a tight budget and a 500MB cap.

The vision, as gleaned from the official descriptions, was one of “laid-back silly fun.” Uplion sought to create a “humorous platform adventure” starring an “angry orange fish” battling a cast of absurd enemies. It was a premise that fit right in with the XBLIG’s penchant for the weird and offbeat. Released on June 11, 2011, it entered a market already saturated with similar titles, competing for attention not only with other indies but with the rising tide of more polished games on the burgeoning Xbox Live Arcade.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The narrative of Call Me Skyfish is less a plotted story and more a series of loosely connected absurdist vignettes. You are Skyfish, a piscine protagonist described ubiquitously as “angry.” His motivation is never explored in any depth; he is simply angry, and his world is filled with things to be angry at.

The cast of antagonists is a surrealist’s dream:
* His Ex-Girlfriend: A curiously human-centric conflict for an aquatic hero, suggesting a backstory of cross-species romance and heartbreak that is never explained.
* Floating Heads: A classic horror trope, rendered here without context or reason, simply existing as obstacles.
* Tsunamis: An environmental threat that pits the fish against his own domain, a curious choice that inverts the usual logic of a hero’s journey.
* Screaming Cats: An enemy that exists purely in the realm of internet meme culture, a low-hanging fruit for easy, nonsensical humor.
* A Radioactive Stick-Figure Hedgehog: The pièce de résistance of absurdity. This enemy feels like a direct, albeit poorly realized, parody of Sonic the Hedgehog, transformed into a glowing, skeletal menace.

There is no dialogue, no lore, no world-building. The “themes” are simply “anger” and “silliness.” The game makes no attempt to justify its own existence or the relationships between its elements. It is a parade of non-sequiturs, a slideshow of bizarre images whose only purpose is to be a target for Skyfish’s bubble-based ire. This lack of narrative cohesion is its defining characteristic; it is a game that operates on dream logic, where the only constant is a vague sense of irritation.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Call Me Skyfish presents itself as an “old school indie platforming adventure run-n-gun with tongue swinging action.” In execution, it is a flawed interpretation of these genres.

• Core Movement & Platforming: Skyfish controls with a clunkiness that feels intentional in its old-school aspiration but crosses into being genuinely imprecise. Jumping is floaty, and landing on narrow platforms often feels more a matter of luck than skill.
• Combat (The “Run-N-Gun”): Skyfish’s primary weapon is a bubble shooter. The act of firing bubbles at enemies is simplistic, lacking feedback or impact. Enemies often exhibit basic, predictable patterns, but the unrefined controls can make even these simple encounters frustrating.
• The Tongue Swing: This is the game’s one purported innovation. The ability to swing from certain points using a long tongue suggests a potential for dynamic, momentum-based traversal, akin to a primitive Bionic Commando or Spider-Man. In practice, the mechanic is poorly implemented, with awkward physics and unclear grapple points, making it more of a novelty than a integral, enjoyable part of the gameplay loop.
• Progression & UI: The game is level-based, with players progressing through a linear series of stages. There is no character progression system, no upgrades, and no meta-game. The UI is minimalistic and functional, reflecting the game’s overall lack of complexity.

The core gameplay loop is simple: move from left to right, jump on platforms, shoot bubbles at bizarre enemies, and occasionally use a poorly implemented tongue to swing. It is a loop that was well-trodden even in 2011, and Call Me Skyfish did little to refine or elevate it. The systems are not broken beyond function, but they are unpolished and unsatisfying, embodying the criticism often leveled at the lower tier of XBLIG offerings: functional, but barely.

World-Building, Art & Sound

The world of Call Me Skyfish is a blank canvas upon which its bizarre elements are haphazardly placed. There is no consistent setting; levels feel like disconnected arenas rather than part of a cohesive world.

• Visual Direction & Art: The game employs a very basic 2D visual style. The art is simplistic, with minimal animation and a crude, almost MS-Paint-like quality in places. Skyfish himself is an orange blob with eyes. The “radioactive stick-figure hedgehog” is exactly as advertised: a stick figure. The screaming cats and floating heads are similarly rudimentary. This wasn’t a stylistic choice akin to Prison Architect‘s minimalism; it was the visual language of limited resources and skill. The overall effect is not one of charming retro nostalgia, but of an unfinished project.
• Atmosphere: The intended atmosphere is “laid-back silly fun,” but the combination of crude visuals, clunky controls, and the protagonist’s perpetual anger creates a dissonant and oddly stressful experience. It feels less like a fun, quirky adventure and more like a mildly frustrating chore.
• Sound Design: Information on the sound design is scarce, but it can be assumed to match the visual quality. Simple sound effects for jumping, shooting, and enemy hits would be the expectation. There is no mention of a soundtrack, suggesting its absence or extreme minimalism.

These elements do not contribute to a positive overall experience; instead, they cement the game’s status as a product of its time and platform—a low-budget, low-effort entry in a marketplace flooded with similar titles.

Reception & Legacy

Call Me Skyfish arrived to a deafening silence. There are no critic reviews on record from major outlets. Its presence on Metacritic is a placeholder, a testament to its obscurity. On Steam, it holds a “Mixed” rating based on 21 user reviews, with 61% (13) being positive and 39% (8) negative. This split is telling.

The positive reviews often come from a place of irony or appreciation for “so bad it’s good” media. They are reviews that celebrate the game’s janky absurdity as a form of entertainment in itself. The negative reviews, such as those found in Steam discussions, are more straightforward in their criticism, calling it “heavily rejected piece of trash” and questioning how it managed to pass through Steam Greenlight years after its original release. One user pointed out that gaming commentator Jim Sterling had covered the game negatively during its Greenlight campaign, highlighting its poor reputation even within indie circles.

Its legacy is virtually non-existent in terms of influence on the industry. It did not pioneer mechanics, inspire genres, or launch a franchise, though curiously, the GameFAQs franchise page lists several purported sequels (Don’t Call Me Skyfish, SKYFISH II EAT YOUR PEAS, Skyfish Forever). There is no evidence these games actually exist beyond this database entry; they appear to be fictional or joke entries, which is perhaps the most fitting legacy for Skyfish itself.

Instead, its legacy is archeological. Call Me Skyfish is a perfect museum piece from the XBLIG era. It represents the unvarnished, uncurated side of indie game development—a reminder that for every breakthrough success, there are hundreds of forgotten experiments that were released, played by a handful of people, and faded away. It is a case study in the challenges of digital storefronts like XBLIG and Steam Greenlight, which struggled to balance open access with quality control.

Conclusion

Call Me Skyfish is not a good game by any conventional critical metric. Its narrative is nonsensical, its gameplay is clunky and unrefined, and its presentation is rudimentary. It is a title that was critically ignored and commercially obscure upon release, and time has not been kind to it.

However, to dismiss it entirely would be to miss its historical value. As a professional historian of the medium, one must look at Call Me Skyfish not as a failure, but as a vital part of the video game ecosystem’s fossil record. It is an unpolished gem not of quality, but of context. It encapsulates the spirit of a specific time and place—the wild west of XBLIG, where anyone could be a developer and any idea, no matter how bizarre or half-baked, could find a digital storefront.

Its place in video game history is not on the main shelf alongside the classics, but in the archives, as a reference point for understanding the full, unfiltered spectrum of game creation. It is a testament to the passion to create, even in the absence of budget, skill, or a coherent vision. Call Me Skyfish is, ultimately, a curious footnote—a bizarre, angry, orange fish forever swimming in the forgotten currents of gaming history.