You’d be forgiven for thinking The Wide Open Sky is Running Out of Catfish (hereby referred to as Wide Open Sky) is merely a twee, low-poly photography game with a story and unique setting. That was certainly my impression after watching the trailer, and it was more than enough to get me excited—the geopolitical climate and my own personal existential anxiety get markedly worse every day at this point, so yeah, sign me the hell up for a Pokémon Snap-like where you take pictures of fish swimming through the sky while you ride on the back of a giant talking catfish. Sounds great right about now.
Wide Open Sky, however, isn’t really that at all. Don’t get me wrong; it’s been a salve for my soul the past couple of days, a timely reminder that there are still plenty of good people creating great art at a time where it feels like we need it more than ever. It’s just more of an adventure and puzzle game with a heavy narrative focus as opposed to one that’s attempting to gamify photography like the aforementioned Pokémon Snap. To be clear, that’s anything but a critique in this case, since its narrative is going to stick with me far, far longer than if I’d been awarded an arbitrary number of points for getting the perfect shot of a tortoise.
You take on the role of Jet, the child of a witch that lives on Catfish (a giant, flying, talking, uh, fish). Jet goes to college on Earth and is home on Catfish for the summer but is hit with the one-two punch of their witch mom disappearing and the knowledge that Catfish is dying. Alone and isolated, aside from being able to talk to their college friends back on the ground over an instant messenger program installed on the family computer, Jet is thrust into a new world of all too relatable adult problems, like taking care of a dying loved one, maintaining long-distance friendships under duress, and filling the lifeless sky back up by playing a magic flute to control a sky serpent to eat clouds, which will transform them into fish.
The fantastical story and setup contrast nicely with the more down-to-earth elements, such as taking pictures with a digital camera and uploading them to a photo-sharing website or browsing blogs in an in-game web browser, looking for clues to solve the puzzle of how to wake a seal up to eat some sky squids for you. Jet is a mortal stuck in a world filled with magic, receiving faxes they don’t understand from intimidatingly named witch organizations and desperately searching the world for their mom, who it turns out has gone off in search of a way of preventing Catfish from dying, in defiance of the natural order; while their mom seeks to alter the laws of the universe, Jet wants her home so someone else can be responsible while the world falls apart around them.
Things aren’t that simple, though; our parents are flawed, with their own preconceived notions and fears, and no matter how much we might want to bury our heads in the sand and let other people do the thinking so we don’t have to worry about a problem anymore, at some point a realization has to dawn that this isn’t good enough. Like a wise, flying magic catfish once said, “Sometimes life has to be about action.” And sometimes that action is trading bubbles for crabs, so he’ll give your best friend a hot air balloon.
Love and death and the inseparable link between them are everywhere in The Wide Open Sky is Running Out of Catfish. I’ve been scared of my own mortality and aging since I was, I dunno, 10 years old? Too young to be worried about stuff like that, at any rate. The first time an older family member had to undergo a surgery, I distinctly recall absolutely dreading the prospect of getting as old as 25. Or heaven forbid, 30!? I might as well be dead.
And now suddenly, before I realized it, I’m married and approaching middle age; I can’t grow bangs anymore, and our cat has to eat special, smellier-than-average cat food that he hates but is supposed to help his kidneys. If you can learn to accept the inevitable loss of, well, all of this, then when you find your people and what you love, you don’t even notice getting older. Besides that growing widow’s peak I’m confronted with in the mirror every day.
That, ultimately, is what I think The Wide Open Sky is Running Out of Catfish is trying to point out and what makes it a game that’ll stick in the inner recesses of my brain for the rest of my life.
