Aquarist

While it's beautiful and kinda a little fun, the main appeal for me when I bought it was the idea of decorating beautiful aquariums (isnt that most peoples appeal?) and the difficulty in placing items in the tank has really turned me off of this game. I've played 4 hours, and I don't think I'll play any more. Accidentally place deco on the glass? your only option is to sell it for a loss. The placement system is extremely clunky.

At this point I don't recommend the game. First you start with a tutorial, and it's a long tutorial so be sure to have some time since as far as I can tell you can't save in between. Then when you've made it through and think this is the moment you can start building your own shop, the game just tells you some more of what to do. And then when you've finally made it through the tutorial and the starter phase of your own shop, the game throws in a timer. Which really takes any relaxing aspect of the game and just throws it out the window. Especially considering how short the time is you get. You start your day at 6.00 and you open your shop at 14.00. In that time you have to do everything, build aquariums, clean existing ones, feed fish, sell/buy fish, restock your shop... You name it. And at 14.00, when you open the shop, your day is over. You can't keep working or doing anything when customers are there. Also, you have to walk to the door/computer and open the shop. At 14.00 you get a red blinking text telling you to open your shop RIGHT NOW because heaven forbid the poor customers have to wait 5 seconds. It gets tedious. By the time you've finished your existing tasks and can finally start building an aquarium you wonder if it's really worth it to start building one at all. When you progress you can buy an exhibition and later an ocenarium (or something? sorry for the spelling). I was hoping the exhibition would be like your 2nd shop where you can sell more and better aquariums but so far it seems to be mainly for showing them. Which means the basement shop is your one and only shop. And I'm sorry but when I earned 40k I'd much rather spend that on getting a bigger, better and prettier shop. Because of all the tediousness, the short days, the endless tasks you need to achieve each day and the very limited options it doesn't really feel like you get a lot of freedom. Yes, you can build aquariums. As long as you follow the fishes demands (and they work like zootycoon, having demands in amount of plants, water temperature, amount of fishes and number of decorations) and only build basic ones. There is no sandbox mode and the creative freedom you get is extremely limited. It doesn't help the gamecontrols are pretty wonky too. It's pretty tricky to get something on the spot where you want it to be. I hope the game will get better since I do think it has potential. So far from what I've seen the items and fishes are actually pretty fun and very colourful. I think the focus should be less on customer requests and like, making entire buildings/houses for those and more on the core aspects of the game. Having an aquarium store and creating aquariums.

Fun game so far, biggest gripe with it early on is the game encouraging you to flush fish down the toilet, this should NEVER happen.