Rainbows Are Carnivores is a gay fishing / aquaculture romance video game about using your pole to catch some high quality hogs.
"Hog” is, of course, angler slang for a big fish, like a rainbow trout. It could also refer to the many rainbow men who happen to inhabit this video game lake.
You can play the game for free in your web browser, on desktop or mobile. Though I must warn you, it's a bit difficult, so be patient. It'll take 10-20 minutes depending on your luck / prior aquaculture expertise.
CONTENT WARNING: the game is rated-R, but this post is mostly PG-13. There's a butt.
SPOILER WARNING: this post SPOILS the gameplay and ending. Play it first if you care about spoilers.
This game is about a fisherman daddy who's fishing for slippery sexy men. You click / tap to cast your fishing rod, then hold to reel in whatever you caught. Usually you end up catching a naked man.
The fisherman grades each catch. However the traditional way of grading fish, by weight / length, feels a bit weird to apply to humans. So instead the fisherman rates each man with a vague visual heart-shaped percentage; perhaps this represents overall compatibility, attractiveness, or quality. I leave this exact meaning ambiguous.
The game doesn't explain how to get a better catch. The player must guess how to make the heart fill up better. Since this looks like a fishing game, maybe it's all about your fishing technique? Do you have to wait before reeling in? How do you know when to reel?
 |
| screenshot of a shirtless fisherman with a decent catch - but not quite good enough yet |
Most fishing games depict fishing as a complex skill that requires timing and patience to master. Different fish have different behaviors to learn and understand. There's an intimacy there.
Men especially romanticize this intimacy through the culture of homosocial masculine fishing. Father and son fishing trips, camping and “living off the land", TV shows about dangerous yet lucrative manly fishing expeditions -- exploiting the world's endless natural resources requires copious masculine skill. "Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime!" We pair this romance with abundance: "there's plenty of fish in the sea" -- but somehow it's never reassuring, is it?
A 2024 UN report notes only 62.3% of marine fisheries were biologically sustainable in 2021. North Sea countries lowered 2026 cod catch quotas by -44% (ignoring scientists' advice for a zero-catch quota for cod to truly recover). Fish stocks will decline further with continued overfishing and climate change. Aquaculture will intensify, stressing water systems and dwindling freshwater. There's never been fewer fish in the sea (so far).
 |
| artificially-stocked lakes by Alex Brown, from "The Fish That Climbed A Mountain" |
The mythical homosocial romance of wilderness fishing clashes with the stark industrial reality of fish farming. Alex Brown examines this dissonance in his article “The Fish That Climbed A Mountain” for Longreads:
"[...] I had joined my dad, brother, and some family friends on a backpacking trip in the Eagles Nest Wilderness in Colorado. After we made camp by a lake, I walked down to the shoreline and assembled a small fishing rod. [...] It was a trip that changed something in me [...]
[...] What I do know—now—is that the trout in the lake were dumped from an airplane by Colorado Parks & Wildlife. That the first salmon I ever caught, on a river along Lake Michigan, was a species that didn’t exist in the Great Lakes until 1966. That the rainbows I pulled out of Green Lake in Seattle, the fishing that kept me sane during the pandemic, reached their impressive size after years of being fattened in a hatchery. My treasured memories, I’ve learned, are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex..."
 |
| aerial photo of Chalk Cliffs Trout Rearing Unit operated by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, which produces 700,000 trout per year; one of 19 hatcheries across the state |
So in my game, this is why the player's fishing technique has zero influence on the quality of the catch.
From a wildlife management / industrial aquaculture perspective, it doesn't matter if you're a master angler or a beginner googan. You're just another number to be managed, a farming input with your so-called "skill" abstracted away. Fishers are maybe even the weakest input in the entire factory chain -- a laughably slow and inefficient way to harvest fish.
Thus, Rainbows Are Carnivores is an experimental fishing game without traditional fishing sim genre mechanics like bait selection, aiming, or line tension management. It is more about what fishing means and represents.
This acts as an implicit critique of the fishing game genre: don't just take the same attitude toward fishing all the time! Fishing isn't just one thing! When we make the same type of fishing game over and over, we ignore all the other aspects of fishing.
 |
| bite-centric screenshot from 2011 re-release of the classic Sega Bass Fishing (1997) |
The first clue that this game doesn't care about fishing technique is in the game camera: it doesn't follow your hook, it always stays fixated on the fisherman. The game camera never moves. The most dramatic moment of traditional fishing games, the bite, always happens off-screen.
Since I never show the bite, I hoped players would realize that reel timing doesn't matter. But in playtesting it proved difficult to deprogram players. Some players would simply stare at the screen and do nothing, as if waiting for a divine sign from the Fishing Game Gods to start reeling. Thus I had to compromise and add some half-hearted fish bite UI indicators and game feel juice to prompt players to start reeling. Hopefully the uniformity and lack of responsiveness teaches players to take the bite for granted, as intended.
The second, more significant clue that your fishing technique doesn't matter: all the fish farming management gameplay.
 |
| various technical diagrams and data tables from "Manual For Rainbow Trout Production On The Family-Owned Farm" (1991) by George W. Klontz |
To research the fish farm gameplay, I studied the notorious aquaculture masterpiece "Manual For Rainbow Trout Production On The Family-Owned Farm" by George W. Klontz written in 1991.
I was struck by the sheer amount of statistics and lookup tables. The optimal water temperature for a trout, how much oxygen it needs, how much space... it's like fish are made of numbers.
In the game I carefully pace the introduction of these numbers. At first there's no numbers or text because it's all about the fantasy of fishing as "natural" or "wild" intuition and skill. But then after your third catch, a vague blinking button inexplicably appears at the bottom of the screen.
Pushing that button suddenly reveals a dense aquaculture dashboard with a dozen unexplained water quality and fish feed factors. Paolo Pedercini’s admirable "no exposed numbers" game design methodology anti-inspired me to over-expose these numbers. I sought an indecent exposure / mental math flood, designed to overwhelm and obliterate your prior romantic notions of the fishing system. (To soften the violence, the dashboard has a bit of gentle Wii Shop inspired elevator muzak by my spouse Eddie Cameron.)
 |
| the aquaculture dashboard with (hint) pretty good settings that'll likely win the game for you |
Fish and water are surprisingly complicated. I simulate only 12 factors:
- Water Quality: Temperature, pH, Oxygen, Alkalinity
- Pollutants: Calcium, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate, Phosphate, Suspended Solids
- Feed: Fish Meal, Fish Oil
Each factor has a hidden ideal number range, based on all the trout farming manuals I read. If you have some prior knowledge already, you can guess the ideal closely enough: cold-ish temperature and neutral-ish acidity, high oxygen, a little alkalinity, and minimal pollutants.
Also note this is a very simplified model. My sim factors don't interact, e.g. water temperature does not affect dissolved oxygen capacity. My fish can also survive near-zero oxygen and Superfund magnitudes of polluted waters -- homophobic players cannot engineer a mass die-off of queer men in the lake.
How do you figure out the best numbers? Most players will run their own repeated trials and experiments by making random adjustments and then catching a fish to measure improvements. To help track progress, the dashboard graphs your last 7 catches, or you can take notes like a real-life aquaculturalist.
The game gives a big (but subtle) hint by showing the initial settings give very low quality. Change everything to its opposite and you're almost there. Of course, subtlety was lost on all my playtesters, who were often reluctant to press any buttons at all -- I had to make each row of buttons blink AND I had to double / triple the numerical impact of each button. As a fail safe, you also accrue hidden bonus points when you make a correct adjustment, amplifying correct signals and speeding up game completion.
 |
| Gay Fishermen |
What does a high quality man look like? I bet it has something to do with those guys who post fish pics in their dating profiles -- you know the stereotype. Men who love going outside, men who can afford to go on a fishing trip, men who can provide for their family / twinks.
But remember, these hot fish pics aren't possible without the artificial abundance made possible by industrial aquaculture and professional water managers.
 |
| Straight Fisherman |
Unmanaged illegal trout dumping cause fish to multiply out of control, compete more, get leaner, and make for worse photos. To avoid disappointing anglers, state wildlife agencies must methodically farm, fatten, and airlift millions of "big unnaturals" to each lake every year.
The fish are a waste byproduct of masculinity farming. The vast majority of stocked trout (85% in one study) die off within months - partly by design, because remember, fisheries don't actually want these fish to survive and get leaner.
Despite this astronomical cost and waste, I support it. I believe all gender-affirming treatments should be subsidized by governments, no matter how many helicopters it takes.
 |
| screenshot of a shirtless guy fishing while a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 unloads men |
In the game, I imply the cost and scale of this industrial gay fish stocking program in a few ways.
Every few catches, a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 "Chinook" tandem-rotor transport helicopter will fly in the distance to dump hundreds of fresh live men into the lake, replenishing the depleted stocks for your continued enjoyment.
Later in the game, the aquaculture dashboard shows a running debt that increases as you press buttons. You could view this large debt as a casual leaderboard stat to minimize, but there's no penalty for spending billions of dollars to generate the perfect fish.
Note that I haven't researched which aircraft the fisheries actually use, or how much all these trout farming programs actually cost, because I don't care that much. I mostly just think it's funny that everyone pretends this vast expensive systemic intervention is so natural, sensible, and effortless. Why stop there? Let's remove even more friction from the experience!
 |
| screenshot of fisherman on his phone while the fishing pole automatically reels in a man |
In the second half of the game, you unlock an "auto fishing" feature: the fishing pole will automatically cast and reel without your input, and the fisherman will idly scroll on his phone.
Auto fishing was originally my dev-only feature for automated playtests. However when I saw (human) playtesters struggle a bit too much, I decided to turn this debug cheat into a mechanic, transforming this game into an incremental / idle game. Here the abstraction of fishing reaches fruition. The game admits the input loop of casting and reeling is vestigial and unnecessary. What matters is results.
Canny players will keep the dashboard permanently open while the auto fishing rod collects new data. Now you can optimize your aquaculture factors without all that pesky fishing and nudity getting in the way! This is maybe my deepest joke: by the end of this sexy fishing game, you'll ignore the sexy fishing to contemplate nitrate levels.
Despite this endgame emphasis on economics and efficiency, I wanted to snap the ending back to romance. Yet a horny ending felt so predictable. I know it's difficult to imagine, but what else can two men do by the lake?
 |
| a sexy film still from "Stranger By The Lake" (2013) directed by Alain Guiraudie |
Recently I watched a fantastic French film called Stranger By The Lake (2013). It's about a bunch of queer men cruising for sex by the lake... and one of them is a murderer. It's an amazing modern gay thriller that doesn't need an essay to inflate its queerness. Everything is there on the screen. It's truly one of the best movies I've seen in a while. The ending made me scream. It artfully mixes sex and violence.
If we're honest, every act of fishing has an inherent violence to it. Fishing is a metaphor for romance and sex, but given the choice, fish (and people) generally do not consent to being fished.
On page 8, Klontz's 1991 rainbow trout farming manual states, “based on their food preferences, rainbows are carnivores.”
I've appropriated this surprisingly poetic phrase for my game title. It's funny to associate these intangible illusory symbols of hope and pride -- with meat consumption. But it also informs the direction I took with the ending: a bit of violence.
 |
| animated GIF of the ending "climax": the fish forces the fisherman to take a knee |
So here's the game ending: after the fisherman catches his ideal 100% quality fish / man, the couple shares a hot makeout for a moment. Then the fish's own heart meter appears, but stops at 17%, as if the fisherman himself is incompatible or poor quality. The fish's heart breaks, but the fish can't throw back the fisherman, so instead he knees the fisherman in the groin and then swims away. (This is less gruesome than what happens in Stranger By The Lake.)
When the fisherman resurfaces, the fish is gone for good. He treads water alone while the credits appear. Off in the distance, a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 Chinook tandem-rotor transport helicopter dumps hundreds of fresh live men into the lake.
Then the fisherman's heart appears again, but smaller, and maybe more fragile. Yet no matter how many times you click / tap, you can't break his heart. Maybe he's still in love with the man who hurt and rejected him? There's no point in fishing anymore. He will forever yearn for the one who got away.
 |
| screenshot of the game ending: a lonely fisherman treading water, pondering the one who got away |
We obsess over numbers and metrics because it gives us an illusion of control over our lives. But numbers aren't reality, numbers guarantee nothing. Even if fish are made of numbers, those numbers still can't make a fish love you back.
Maybe it's a commentary on dating and romance in the app era. If we are the "plenty of fish in the sea", we're also using technology to overfish ourselves -- industrializing romance just like we've industrialized fishing, with diminishing returns. Dating pools enclosed by dating apps are like artificially abundant lakes where most relationships die off by the end of the season like farmed trout.
You gotta change your perspective, bro. You're not a temporarily embarrassed pro angler nor an elite industrial aquaculture manager. You're actually a fish, just like the rest of us. Go outside and touch water.
Rainbows Are Carnivores is a free experimental gay fishing game playable in your web browser on mobile / desktop. It'll take you 10-20 minutes to play, depending on your luck and prior aquaculture expertise.
