Game logic is just the best. In Aquarium Land, you own an aquarium that’s built next to a beach. That beach is crawling with the very sea life that you then catch and relocate all of ten metres to your aquarium. Nobody thinks to, you know, go to the beach and see the creatures in their natural habitat. No, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute, just to observe a seal crammed into a tank.
It’s not the only detail in Aquarium Land that makes zero sense. The game is riddled with them (why am I catching fish just by looking at them?). But we’ve never marked a game down for that, nor should we. It’s just fun to stop and wonder what a real-world version would look like sometimes.
Aquarium Land is an idle game in management-sim clothing. You play one of those generic-looking stickman avatars that you often see in mobile games, and your task – as you might have gleaned from the previous paragraphs – is to take creatures from the sea and stock them in your aquarium. People will then come to purchase them (“would madame like a bag with that squid?”), which generates cash, and that cash can be spent on upgrades.
The catching bit is so laid-back that you could do it with one-hand tied behind your back – quite literally, as it happens, as this is a one-button endeavour. You hop into the sea and a visibility cone appears in front of your little dude. Keep a fish within that cone for long enough, and it will hop into your inventory. But they’re living animals that would rather not become pets, so they escape, wiggle and occasionally leap out of the way. Your task is to keep them within that cone, even as they move, which becomes increasingly difficult as the levels progress.
This can all be automated, which is where the idle stuff comes in. Workers wait in the aquarium, and they can be bought and upgraded with cash and gem-like currency. You can see the vestiges of a free-to-play game here, as Aquarium Land’s gems were undoubtedly originally bought with real cash on mobile. But there’s no such obstacle here: gems are gained by diving for pearls and completing missions, so you can freely employ workers who gather extra creatures on the side.
There’s some baubles to keep an eye out for too, as fragments of ships, submarines and other marine vessels can be found in the depths. These can be pieced together for an achievement and some extra gems. Completing the various aquarium enclosures will also ‘net’ you a key, which can open a door on the sea wall. This leads to some lightweight stealth gameplay before you can catch a unique fish. It’s all frippery but it’s nice that it’s there: it means that finishing a level has a neat closure to it.
With an inventory full of fish, you’re heading into the aquarium, and it’s similarly simplistic and one-button. You don’t have to think much about anything at all: there’s a tank for each fish, and wandering nearby will automatically suck that fish into its rightful place. The same goes for selling the fish. You just stand near the till, and the queue of punters will carefully construct a tower of cash for you.
There are a few choices to be had, but not many. You can choose to spend the money and gems on new tanks or upgrades. New tanks mean a greater variety of fish can be caught, so it verges on a no-brainer. Upgrades include a larger inventory (so fewer back-and-forths), more workers, more money from visitors, and other such stuff.
So the loop goes on, as an inventory full of fish is brought to the aquarium, which normally coincides with a trip to the till to get more cash. An upgrade of the tanks means a new jellyfish or beluga can be caught, then you’re back out into the wide-open blue to start the loop again. The only thing that breaks the loop is the purchase of the final tank. It’s here that the next region is available, where everything resets – aside from the cash, gems and avatar upgrades. But it will only take half an hour or so to finish that one, too.
If it sounds lacking in strategy or difficulty then yep, you’re bang on the money. This is not the game to play if you’re interested in flexing some grey or muscular matter. Instead, it’s somewhere between a cozycore sim like a Stardew Valley, and an idle game. You can effectively switch off all major functions, leave a singular thumb working, and complete the entire game. And your appreciation of that will be determined by whether you were looking for something more.
As a family, we weren’t looking for something more. We fancied some easygoing, frothy gameplay. As a result, we were smitten. This is so much more engaging and fun than a traditional clicker, with the aquarium theme being the cherry on top. There’s something deeply satisfying about catching outlandish fish, rather than mining rocks or tapping on static monsters. You dive theatrically into the sea and suddenly you’re grabbing things that really shouldn’t fit into your backpack. Blue whales, giant squids – they’re all there.
Plus there are so many little knobs and levers to tweak if you fancy shifting out of first gear and into second. You can look to complete animal collections, should you be something of a completionist, or you can tick off the various missions. A gent in a top hat offers the big bucks for specific creatures. And the upgrades overlap, making the choice of which one to unlock next a reasonably difficult one. We didn’t expect all these features, but the fact that they’re there is an additional level of polish.
Which is a neat segue into the main negative of Aquarium Land. There are gaps in that polish. Aquarium Land is a buggy game, more than it should be for something so simple. Our workers often spent more time walking into walls and jetties than actually gathering up fish for us. There’s no nudging them, either – you just walk straight through them. We had missions completed for the entire game, but couldn’t cash them in for gems. And, most critically, a latter level didn’t hand out a key that would allow us to make progress and gain those tempting final achievements. It might just be an ‘us’ problem, but Aquarium Land is incomplete as a result.
Without the bugs – and they’re everywhere – this would have been an instant recommendation for anyone who likes their gaming chilled. Aquarium Land is a management sim where the management is done with a single button, which should be overly simplistic but turns out to be endlessly addictive. But the bugs are a bad aftertaste to a fantastic seafood platter.
