Not since the halcyon days of Seaman (1999) has a virtual aquarium felt like an inviting prospect. We’re still not there, until Seaman 2 becomes a reality, but we can have our dreams. Whereas that game had an abundance of personality and was deeply weird, most aquarium simulators play out something more like Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping — a cute little screensaver type idle game made for small engagements with somewhat self-limiting design philosophies.
Here’s the catch: While Tiny Aquarium looks like a social game and plays like a social game and has Social Fishkeeping in its subtitle, it’s hardly a social game at all. It feels very isolating actually.
As the keeper of some fish tanks, you’ll collect and take care of over 70 kinds of fish with all sorts of range from piranhas to axolotls. All the fish are cute and small then they are big and unseemly and should be sold off for top dollar before they die.
The social hooks that are here are super minimal. You can go fishing in glorified chat rooms that improve your chances of catching rare fish with a server or other players. You can also look at other players’ tanks and leave reactions. That’s literally it.
There’s hardly any mechanical engagement to speak of. You keep a bar floating just below a fish while fishing for it, you pop bubbles full of currency, you feed your fish, and clean your tank, and that’s roughly the whole scope of the game. It’s really meant to be played in very short bursts.
The early days of the game, though, seem to have potential built into them. The developers, Lunheim Studios, have been responsive and the game has improved steadily every day until and after launch.
But will it hook you? Right now it’s limited. You can have just five tanks and you’ll fill a few of them more quickly than you think, and constantly be struggling to make room by selling off fish. Then, you’ll naturally want to decorate and while there are some preliminary items, the lack of variety currently means when you go scope out everyone else’s tanks… they’ll probably look just about identical to yours.
This is, however, something more like a live service game, one entirely oriented around the spending and collection of in-game currency. It feels like work. Little bits of jobs that accumulate and then you get to do the thing you want to do, but it’s certainly one of those sorts of social and casual games, where you’ll just always be tryin to get to do what you want, and rarely will you be doing it.
With the support of the devs, it’s very easy to imagine how this game will grow and that it will have a long tail. For now, it’s built for very little engagement and doesn’t really feel outsized in the genre in any special way except it looks pretty nice just sitting your desktop.