Abandonware.
When this game was released by Daniel Santalla, it had a great start. While the mechanics of the game were somewhat basic, the art and feel of the desktop fishes were amazing.
In the first few days after the release, users complained about missing features. Luckily, Daniel did implement one of them called "Fish Bowl", and not only that, but he also announced a roadmap with dates and promises.
Sadly, none of the promised features got released. The developer went silent and stopped responding to anyone quite quickly. It felt like the developer released the game just to make a quick buck, then never returned to it again.
Annoying features.
First, when you launch the game, it will repeatedly ask you to set the language, select a monitor, and configure the screen border. The game will never attempt to remember your preferences. It doesn't even have an "OK" button to close it.
The game also does not remember optional settings such as “Lights” and "Wallpaper mode / Overlay mode" - the fish will always float on top of your windows, forcing you to toggle it manually.
The game lets you decorate your fish with "goodies" like hats, glasses, and holding accessories. However, all of those goodies are thrown into one menu, making it look incredibly unorganized.
Gameplay struggles.
After 12 hours of playtime, your screen will be filled with many fish, which can cause lag. The developer could have implemented a limit on the fish, but he chose to add poison instead. Fish love to eat it, but:
- you can't force-feed specific fish;
- fish won't instantly eat it - they will stare at it for X number of seconds;
- some fish swim more slowly towards the poison than others;
- once a fish eats it, there is a 50:50 chance that it will live.
You literally must tediously push specific fish to the corner of the screen and push other fish away. Although some other fish will still somehow manage to see the poison and snatch it away.
The same problem goes with food for breeding - you must push certain fish away, too, but some fish will snatch the food anyway.
Also, when you notice that you have duplicated fish, the game does not have an indicator about duplication, something like "x2", "x3", and so on, forcing the player to do some tedious detective work.
Lastly, there is an octopus who sells items. It only offers three items, and after you buy them, it will offer you three more. Those can be fish eggs, food for breeding, poison, and "goodies". Here are some issues:
- When you click to summon it, the button doesn't always summon it due to a weird but annoying delay.
- It always spawns in the same location, scaring/pushing fish to the top-right side of the screen. I wish it had a random spawn location.
- The sales are inconsistent. Sometimes it will offer you two goodies and food for breeding. Sometimes two eggs and poison. And sometimes two poison items and one egg. Why not offer all four items?
- The design of the octopus is lazy. It’s just two red rectangular eyes without shading.
Redundant Perk Tree.
The perk tree allows the player to view which fish species and colors they have so far. For every different color, you gain one point. Those points can be used to buy perks from the perk tree. However, some perks in the perk tree don't do anything or are straight-up pointless. For example:
- "Eternal Lover" perk has a weird description: "Fish keep looking for a partner for longer". Why would I need that? I would prefer quick mating. Not to mention that fish never look for mates voluntarily in this game.
- "Discount Market" perk should give lower prices, but I feel like it acts like a placebo. Perhaps this perk does give you lower prices, but they feel incremental.
- The perks "Seaweed Expansion" and "Seaweed Speed" are self-explanatory, but after buying them, it's hard to notice a difference.
- "Quick Hatchers" allows baby fish to hatch faster. While this sounds nice, fish eggs already hatch quickly anyway.
- "Bouncier Eggs" - why is this a thing? It's silly, yes, but I would rather spend my points on something better, especially if other perks become more expensive.
None of your progress is saved to the cloud, especially for achievements.
If you invested your time into evolving your aquarium and your perk tree, none of it will be sent to your other machines.
I also had an incident where Steam logged me out of my laptop during the night. When Steam logs the user out of the account, none of the Steam hours are counted. However, when I logged back in, Steam gave me an achievement for spending 500 hours together with my fish, despite playing this game for less than 500 hours. The same happened with the 1000-hour achievement.
The game eventually destroys itself.
At some point, after I launched the game X number of times, the game decided to show only sea grass and bubbles. No fish, no menus, no exit buttons - nothing.
I also noticed on the Steam forums that players have complained about their perk trees being reset for no reason.
In the end…
This game could have been great for chilling. However, many features make it difficult to enjoy. Not to mention that the developer abandoned such an awesome project. I feel like the developer rushed this game and did not take the time to experiment, test, and ask "what-if" questions before releasing the game.
Overall, I wish I could love this game, but in such a poor state, it’s a disaster.
4.5/10
