| Quick Verdict: Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping is a cute, social fishing game that allows you to keep fish in a tank for passive income. While it’s fun to decorate, there are several quality-of-life improvements needed. |
| Game: | Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping |
| Developer(s): | Lunheim Studios |
| Publisher: | Future Friends Games |
| Review Score: | 8 |
| Cozy Score: | 8 |
| Price: | $4.99 |
| Pros: | Pretty graphics, chat feature, events, and the ability to freeze aquariums to prevent fish loss. |
| Cons: | You can’t sell from the boat, things are locked behind levels, bait is sold individually for a fair bit of coin, and tiny mode isn’t interactable. |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Creature Collector, Light idling |
Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping is a little bit of everything without being entirely one thing. You have your creature collecting side with fishing, the lightest form of idling since the fish give you passive income over time, and a social aspect that lets you interact with others who are fishing.
Tiny Aquarium offers ways to decorate your tanks, upgrade your tools, and even has events that you can participate in. While there are idling elements, I feel like calling it an idler is doing it a disservice. The only idle aspects available are that your fish will give you money every hour and they grow in real time. Otherwise, they don’t automate fishing or breeding in any way.
At its core, Tiny Aquarium is mostly just fishing. You’ll head out to the ocean either solo or join a lobby and you’ll toss out your line. After you engage in a little mini-game where you have to click and hold your mouse to keep the main bar over the fish, you’ll be rewarded with trash, decoration items, or your prized fish.
If you’ve joined a lobby, you can interact with others. Lobbies can hold upward of 100 people, but I found lobbies full of just 20 people to be a little overwhelming. All the boats overlap and can get in the way of trying to fish. It also makes it a bit hard to see when there is a fish on your line.
Right now, most of the chats are just asking for people to visit their aquariums for a reaction to finish quests in the current event. But, I have to caution that since this is a socializing platform and you can create private rooms, you want to be sure to monitor children who play this game. Obviously, I don’t want to think the worst, but people are terrible and I’d caution anyone to be wary of children unsupervised where chatting functions are active.
It never hurts to be overly cautious on ye olden internets
I’m assuming there are filters in place, but predators will always find a way. So, please keep that in mind when considering this game for a small human in your life.
Outside of social functions, you’ll spend the rest of your time managing your tanks. As you play, you’ll gain experience that will amount to levels. You’ll need those levels to access upgrades because all of them are locked behind a level requirement. I’m not the fondest of this aspect, but I can understand why it was needed so that things stay at a more sedate pace.
Once you start getting levels, you can start upgrading things like your fishing rod, boat, fish food, and the sponge to keep your aquarium clean.
I’ll be honest, there are some features in Tiny Aquarium that I’m not the most fond of. However, it is a fun game and there are no major bug issues. It plays beautifully, it looks gorgeous, and I enjoyed the ambient sounds of fishing.
However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the areas where I thought the direction was questionable or not the best choice and, unfortunately, that’s a fair few things. So, let’s just speed down the list.
Tiny Aquarium offers a “tiny mode” that allows your tank to be minimized on your screen, but you can’t interact with it. Every so often, loot will float up through your aquarium in a bubble that you can pop, but you can’t click it while in tiny mode. You won’t be able to click those when a menu is up either, without closing said menu.
Tiny mode also doesn’t seem to allow you to have it small on a second or third monitor, even when the game is open there. If you have the game open on one of those screens and go into tiny mode, it will snap it to your primary monitor.
Tiny mode, why? Stay in your lane.
When it comes to bait, you’ll mostly be fishing with a bare hook. For whatever reason, you can only buy bait individually with a max of 10 of a certain bait per day and it costs quite a fair bit of money. The lowest bait is corn kernels that cost 300 gold per kernel and the other bait is level locked and more expensive.
Without bait on the hook, you’re far more likely to pull up trash or decorations you’ll quickly get tired of. Additionally, you can’t sell the fish you catch. You either need to discard them and get nothing or put them in your tank. By putting them in your tank, you’ll eventually need to leave the lobby in order to sell them.
I’m unsure why you can’t just sell from your boat, but if you are the host of the lobby and you leave to manage your fish, everyone will be kicked out of the lobby. This means that if someone wants to host, they have a finite amount of time they can stick around if they want to be active.
It’s not really the best system for cultivating a social environment. Tiny Aquarium either needs to be able to sell fish from the boat or have the ability to manage your inventory while in a lobby so that you can continue to fish.
Speaking of fish, you have the option to breed your fish, but it doesn’t appear to really do anything special. Any combination of fish can breed, even a large fish and a small shrimp. The only outcome you get is a clone of one of the parents. You won’t be getting any interesting or new combinations from what I can see.
To be honest, this kind of surprised me since there are tabs in the FishDex that are “special” and “unique”, but from playing the event, I’m learning that these are simply where event or seasonal fish will go.
Watch the trailer for Tiny Aquarium!
The fish have stats for their overall size, fertility, and fortune generation. So, you could potentially play this with the aim to acquire the best of the best, but I won’t pretend to really know anything about that.
Tiny Aquarium relies a lot on real-time mechanics. It’s not just the fish that grow in real-time; everything has real-time cool downs. You can only buy so many decorations in a time period, do so many quests over a few days, or buy a certain number of things within a 24-hour period. Hell, you even get daily rewards for coming back the next day. So, if you’re expecting a game you can sit and binge-play, this won’t be the best option.
Luckily, you have the option to freeze an aquarium if you plan to be away for some time. This ensures that your tank won’t change. It won’t get dirty, your fish won’t get hungry, and none of your fish will die. But, it also means that you won’t be making passive income. So, I’d only suggest implementing this feature if you plan to be off the game for a week or so.
Lastly, let’s talk about events. When Tiny Aquarium launched today, it launched with the “A-Lotl Axolotl” event. This means that you’re given special quests that like fishing up 3 fish, hatching 5 common eggs, getting 5 reactions, etc.
By completing those, you’re given a special currency. You can use that to buy up axolotl eggs, special decorations, and some buffs for your tank. It runs for 13 days from June 23rd to July 7th and it looks like this will be seasonal. So, if you missed this event, it’ll be back around next year.
In the future, you’ll be able to enjoy events with titles like ‘Marine Conservation’, ‘Sakura Tide’, and ‘Black Market’. Those don’t have a date attached, but you can look forward to them coming soon. I’d likely expect those to be quarterly, with seasonal events peppered throughout the year.
Black Market? Tiny mafia aquarium confirmed?
I know most of this review is coming across negatively. Unfortunately, there are just a few quality-of-life adjustments that need to be made at this stage. However, as I said earlier, there are no major bugs or glaring issues with the game. It’s perfectly serviceable and lovely.
If you’d like to give it a try, you can get Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping for $4.99. If this isn’t your cup of tea, you can check out some of my other reviews I’ve done like the adorable Squeakross: Home Squeak Home or the befuddling Aquarist.
