Aquarist Review Summary

Extensive aquarium customization options: Players have extensive creative freedom in designing and customizing aquariums. The game offers a wide variety of fish, plants, decorations, and tank customization options, allowing for unique and personalized aquatic environments. This encourages experimentation and provides a satisfying creative outlet.

Diverse and realistic fish species: The game features a diverse range of fish species with realistic behaviors, enhancing the aquarium simulation experience. Players can learn about different fish and their needs, adding an educational element to the gameplay. The variety of fish contributes significantly to the game's appeal.

Varied gameplay and progression: The game offers a variety of activities beyond aquarium creation, including missions, store management, and underwater exploration. Completing missions and progressing through the game unlocks new content, providing a sense of accomplishment and encouraging continued play. This variety keeps the gameplay engaging and prevents it from becoming repetitive.

Realistic aquarium simulation: The game realistically simulates aquarium keeping, including managing water parameters, caring for fish, and maintaining equipment. This attention to detail creates an immersive experience for players, especially those familiar with the hobby. The game also has a cozy and realistic look.

Helpful and engaging tutorial: The game includes a helpful and well-designed tutorial that guides new players through the basics of aquarium keeping. The tutorial is story-driven and amusing, making it an engaging introduction to the game's mechanics. The tutorial is short and can be completed in about 30 minutes.

Clunky, unintuitive controls: The game suffers from clunky and unintuitive controls, especially when placing and rotating items. This makes aquascaping and decorating frustrating and imprecise, limiting creative freedom and leading to items clipping or falling over.

Tedious, repetitive tasks: The game contains tedious and repetitive tasks that detract from the core aquarium-building experience. Players are forced to perform chores like cleaning, trash pickup, and repetitive actions to fill tanks, overshadowing the creative aspects and limiting player freedom.

Inadequate save system: The game's save system is inadequate, lacking quicksave and autosave features. This leads to significant progress loss after crashes, forcing players to repeat sections and adding frustration.

Numerous game-breaking bugs: The game is plagued with bugs, including game-breaking issues in the tutorial that prevent progression and cause crashes. These bugs lead to lost progress and make the game unplayable for some players.

Poor localization/translation: The game suffers from poor localization and translation, resulting in spelling errors and sentences that are difficult to understand. This detracts from the overall experience and makes it hard to follow the story or instructions.

Design, build, and maintain aquariums: The core gameplay loop revolves around designing, building, and maintaining aquariums, managing resources, and progressing through different locations. Players balance the needs of aquatic life, manage water chemistry, and expand their operations from a small basement to larger exhibitions and oceanariums. The game features a variety of fish species, decorations, and accessories to unlock as they progress.

Simplified aquarium management mechanics: The game simplifies certain aspects of aquarium management, such as filter and temperature control, and water quality, making it more casual and accessible. However, this simplification may reduce the realism and depth for players seeking a more challenging simulation.

Incorporates elements from other games: The game incorporates elements from other simulation games, such as house renovation and fossil hunting, through odd jobs and side quests. These tasks add depth to the experience by introducing manual labor and survival game mechanics.

Objects disappearing from fish tank: Some players have reported issues with objects disappearing from the fish tank, including fish, decorations, and grass. This bug can negatively impact the player's experience and the visual appeal of their aquariums.

Food and coral needs unclear: The game requires specific food for herbivores and carnivores, but the herbivore plant image sometimes doesn't show. Also, coral food's effectiveness is uncertain as coral needs are not apparent.

Inconsistent technical performance and stability: Players report a range of technical issues, from minor graphical glitches and lag to crashes and failures to launch, even on systems exceeding minimum requirements. Some users experienced overheating and black screens, while others encountered no issues. This inconsistency suggests optimization problems.

Cannot maximize after minimizing: The game has a bug that prevents it from being maximized after being minimized. This is a specific, reproducible issue that impacts usability.

Translated text appears too small: A minor bug causes translated text to appear very small. While not game-breaking, this impacts readability and user experience for non-English speakers.

Lack of time pressure: The game's day/night cycle and shop hours create a relaxed, untimed gameplay experience. There is no pressure to complete tasks within a certain timeframe.

Mixed reception; potential, but flawed: The general sentiment towards the game is mixed. Many reviewers acknowledge the game's potential and find aspects to enjoy, but temper their recommendations due to bugs, lack of content, and unpolished gameplay. Some suggest waiting for sales or further updates before purchasing.

Requests for more content/features: Reviewers suggest several improvements and additions to enhance the game, including more fish species, improved aquarium design tools, better fish behavior, Steam Workshop support, and more content such as additional scenarios and quests.

Good for aquarium/simulation fans: The game is frequently recommended for players who enjoy simulation games, particularly those focused on aquariums, fish keeping, and creative design. It's also suggested as a good starting point for beginners interested in learning about aquarium management before investing in a real setup.

Developers not listening to feedback: Some reviewers express disappointment with the developers for not listening to player feedback, leading to negative reviews despite the game's potential. This suggests a breakdown in communication and responsiveness to community concerns.

Positive feedback for Japanese DLC: The Japanese Garden DLC is specifically praised for adding engaging design and decoration possibilities, enhancing the overall experience with new items and Koi fish.

Early Access, frequent updates: The game is in early access and receives frequent updates. This suggests that the game is still under development and that the developers are actively working on improving it.

Controller incompatibility issues: The game has controller incompatibility issues. Players are forced to use mouse and keyboard.

Aquarium purchases stop mid-game: The game stops featuring aquarium purchases in the mid-game. This limits the player's options and progression.

Shameless self-promotion: The game features shameless self-promotion within the odd jobs. This can be immersion-breaking and detract from the overall experience.

In-game day starts at 2pm: The in-game day starts at 2pm for unexplained reasons. This is an odd design choice that can be confusing or immersion-breaking for players.