Review: Fish Game took us to the aquarium, but should you go all in? 

I wrote about Fish Game in a listicle when Steam NEXT 2023 debuted it. From the graphics to the voice acting in the trailer, I was hooked. Overall, I was very excited to give this game a try. 

I’m fairly familiar with games of this nature and have always enjoyed them, so I saw no reason why Fish Game shouldn’t spark the same amount of joy as older titles. 

I had a lot of high hopes in booting up this game, but did it deliver? 

At the end of the review, I’ll be going into something that I feel was a huge misstep for Fish Game and why you may want to wait on this game for a while to buy it. 

Story and Gameplay for Fish Game

If you’re a person who thrives on lore in a game, you won’t be satisfied. There isn’t a story, you might as well not even exist as a person. This game presents a very omniscient point of view. 

You have tanks and there are shops, but the shops don’t even take money. You literally take whatever you want from the tanks and put them in your own. Hell, you can even take it from your own tank and put it back in the store with no fuss. 

In this way, I’d say this is less of a game and more of an experience. Unfortunately, since the game seems to still be in hidden early access, you can’t do everything promised. 

The only thing resembling currency is the XP gained daily by in-game days. You get 1 XP a day and you can use those to upgrade some features. None of the features are necessarily groundbreaking. You can upgrade to clean the glass, put in a background, and open up new shops among other small features.

You get some mobility back by being able to take care of the chemical levels in the tank, but you do that by making sure the plants and objects in the tank are harmonious. You can change the water, but that never seemed to change much for me. Later, I’ll discuss why this is actually a mildly infuriating aspect of this game.

Art / Music

The art is beautiful, but if you have an older computer, you’ll need to dial down the frames per second and graphics to get it to run without lagging. Beyond that, I have zero complaints about how the game looks.

The fish are beautiful and while the plants can offer a bit too much shade, they’re such a welcome addition to the tank. 

The music wasn’t anything special, but I think that’s a good thing. My brain was able to acknowledge it but tune it out. I like that it wasn’t a distracting element to such a chill, atmospheric setting.

Coziness

There’s a lot of cozy potential for Fish Game. There is nothing hurried about any aspect of gameplay and watching the tanks can be quite relaxing. 

However, there’s nothing in this that offers you an escape. To me, a good cozy game transports you into the game and takes you away from your problems.

You’ll have a hard time turning off your brain with this game due to the limited range of mechanics needed to keep the game running. And some of the mechanics can cause frustration due to either design or glitching. Some things aren’t intuitive or apparent, so it created a lot of moments where I was confused or irritated. 

Cons

The biggest con, by far, is the fact that on Steam, the game has been taken off of Early Access. Nothing in the listing says that they are still adding to this game. It’s being sold as a fully completed game.

However, that simply isn’t the case. Booting up the game, it says “Early Access Version 00.02.01” in the bottom corner. This wasn’t something that I immediately noticed, so when I couldn’t figure out how to do a lot of things, I was frustrated. There’s more on this development at the end of the article.

For instance, each fish shows their spawning drive, leading you to believe that you can breed fish. I went through all three available shops and with over 150 fish, all of them were male. I had to go to the internet to be told that breeding hasn’t been implemented yet in something marketed as a full game. 

In addition, you can’t heal your fish. If your fish is injured, you just have to hope that it gets better on its own. There’s no way to offer aid to it at this time. The trailer mentioned hospital tanks, but I’m forced to believe it’s just a tank you create for your injured fish. Either it gets better or it doesn’t.

Between trying to find a female fish and trying to heal my injured fish, I lost about an hour of gameplay time. That should have never happened. 

Not only that, but my first game glitched. I got my first XP about 30 minutes into gameplay and then got nothing else. I had to close the game and open it back up to start earning correctly. I was convinced until that point that it was only 1 XP per real day of gameplay, which isn’t the case.

It should also be mentioned that you need to be careful what cursor is activated. To make it easy to move things, they have settings to click where you only move fish, plants, items, or all. Having been set to fish, it took me quite a while to realize I could take the plants and objects to put in my own tank.

Lastly, keeping the tank clean can be challenging or it’s simply glitched. You unlock a glass cleaner and substrate cleaner to keep algae at bay. However, even with NOTHING in my tank, the algae kept coming back immediately making it uninhabitable. 

I resorted to turning on the function meant to keep the tank stable for idle play and the algae still grew. At this point, I think my only option is to either reboot the game and hope it was a glitch or nerf the tank. Either way, it’s frustrating.

Verdict

Unfortunately, this doesn’t feel like a complete game to me. It’s more of an interactive background when the game is running smoothly and a burdensome chore when it’s not.

The fact that it’s still in Early Access without saying so on the Steam page feels disingenuous especially when it’s barring some features from being accessed at this point. 

If you can find it on sale, you may want to give it a try, but I don’t think this game is worth the $25. 

It’s upsetting to say that as the devs have clearly worked hard on this game and apparently are quick to respond on Discord to questions. However, I shouldn’t have to go to Discord to learn what is or isn’t in the game when it isn’t in Early Access. 

Upon looking further into this issue, the developer has made a statement on Steam addressing the Early Access/New Release issue going on here. Apparently, it was meant to be Early Access, hence why my game says so, but they didn’t upload it correctly to push it into Early Access. When they launched, it was launched as a full game.

I was a little worried about being so harsh on Fish Game before finding this post, but the Dev goes on to say that not releasing in Early Access is working out better for them, and feel it’s complete enough to merit full release. They, also, say that they feel they don’t need “lenience” in reviews.

Honestly, if they’re happy with the way things are going for them, then that’s fine. But, as this review shows, their thoughts that reviews would be okay and the game stands up on its own merit is incorrect. Hopefully, it won’t be a pitfall for them as this is their first release. 

Move forward with buying this game understanding that it’s not a full game, there are unspoken updates, and that your save file may be affected by those updates. (Their warning, not mine.)