Water-Adjacent Triple Threat ("Aquarist", "Pools", and "Endless Ocean: Luminous")

Hello dear reader, and welcome to another rapid-fire style review collection. This time around, there are two themes tying today's subjects together. Firstly, as the title suggests, all three of these games have something to do with water. Secondly, these are three games that, for differing reasons, I haven't finished. Obviously I'll go into a bit more detail as we go along, but that's the high-level view.

Publisher: Freemind SA, Ultimate Games SA, PlayWay

Developer: Freemind SA, 100 Games SA

Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed for), Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

By far the best of our subjects for today, Aquarist is a simulation game about developing and maintaining aquariums. As an avid aquarist myself, this game is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I get to put together the kinds of aquariums I can only dream of without having to pay the kind of real-world money it would take (and without as much physical labor). On the other hand, I have to ignore some horrifically incorrect information about stocking limits for certain kinds of fish and tank sizes. But ultimately it's more positive than negative.

In Aquarist, you play as a young hobbyist who is given the family garage to use as a storefront for an aquarium store after demonstrating a knack for the craft in childhood. The premise is simple: you put together aquariums of different types to earn progressively more and more money, and as your success grows, you get the opportunity to open up far greater aquatic exhibitions (eventually being able to open up your own oceanarium). You won't find any surprising twists and turns here on the story front, this is really just a sort of power fantasy for aquarium hobbyists like myself.

So with that in mind, the most important aspect of the game is the simulation gameplay. So, let's start off with the aquariums themselves. For any given aquarium, you'll start out by choosing a tank size. Once you have your tank, you'll choose a substrate (such as brown sand or pale rocks) to line the bottom with, and set up a filter, heater, and thermometer. From there, you'll make a couple other decisions based on the kinds of fish you want to use in this tank. Each fish has a type of water they need to have (meaning freshwater or saltwater), an ideal temperature range, a minimum tank size, an ideal amount of decorations and plants, an ideal number of friends, and an ideal PH range for the water. With this in mind, there will be certain kinds of fish that don't thrive in the company of other species. An ideal temperature for one type might be fatal for another, a freshwater fish will die in salt water, and any fish you put in a tank with predatory fish won't last long. So, you'll choose how to decorate and stock your tanks based on these kinds of details. The more impressive the tank, the more money can be earned by selling it in a shop or the more visitors might be drawn to see it in an exhibit. 

So, that's the setup process, but as any aquarist knows, the real battle is maintenance. There are a lot fewer complications in this simulation than in reality, but there are still things to consider. Tanks can get dirty, and this can be rectified with a quick sponge-brushing or including an algae eater in the tank. Tanks can become overstocked if the fish inside breed too frequently. Fish need to be fed every couple of days or so. Things like that. Unlike in real life, there's no need to do water changes or check nitrate/nitrite/ammonia levels, and heaters/filters don't break. Water doesn't evaporate, and fish don't seem to contract any illnesses. So it's not as complicated as real life, but you've still got to be on top of things.

Now, everything I've said so far takes place within a workday structure. Every day starts at around 6AM, and you have until your shop/exhibition/etc opens at 2PM to do tank stuff. After opening your facilities, the next day begins and you receive x amount of money depending on the quality of your tanks and other factors like the cleanliness of the building. And that's basically the entire gameplay loop in a nutshell! Really the only complaint I have is that there's no way to skip over the workday if you have literally nothing you can do until you get the day's earnings. As you get into the late game, you'll find yourself in this situation more and more frequently, at which point things get boring. It's because of this that I haven't finished the game, in fact. But if you're anything like me, you'll enjoy your time setting up the tanks of your dreams enough to not mind that you didn't see absolutely everything. 

As I said earlier, there are some incorrect details that you'll have to contend with if you're a real-life hobbyist like myself. For one thing, and I cannot stress this enough if you're looking at getting into aquariums: algae eaters will NOT keep your tank clean. They might keep things looking decent, but the water chemistry in a tank is invisible and will kill your fish if you just assume that algae eaters will eat everything harmful. Then there are some reeeeally incorrect stocking recommendations. For instance, I have two angelfish in a 29-gallon tank in real life....and that's actually too small, but when I was starting out I made the mistake of believing Petsmart employees. This ultimately means I just have to keep a much closer eye on the water parameters than in my other tanks, but I bring this up because Aquarist tells you that you can keep a whole school of angelfish in what amounts to something like a desktop 10-gallon tank...with several goldfish, no less. So those are the kinds of inconsistencies you'll find, so if you play this and find yourself wanting to get into the hobby, just realize that you WILL have to dedicate far more space, time, and smackeroos than the game implies. 

But no complaint I have is nearly as important as my complaints about the game's technical state. I first picked up this game on the PS5...and on that platform it's literally unplayable. There's a game-breaking bug that halts your progress right after the tutorial on the PS5, and even if you start all the way from the beginning, it will still show up. The game is sitting at about a 1-star rating on PS5 for a reason, in other words. I hear that it's exactly as bad on the Switch, so as far as I'm concerned, PC is the only way to play Aquarist, and even then there's some jankiness with movement and controls. So, just be aware of that going in.

Folks, Aquarist is for one type of people and one type of people only. If you aren't a part of that target audience, I seriously don't think you're going to find anything you like in here. If you're part of that target audience but don't have a PC running Windows, you'll find a tutorial you like and nothing beyond that. These truths make Aquarist a bit of a hard sell, but c'est la vie.

Let us review:

Terrible pacing towards the end - 0.7

Incorrect information - 0.3

Technical flaws across several platforms - 1.0

The final score for Aquarist is...

8.0/10 - Great

Well done....big list of developers, well done!

Publisher: Tensori

Developer: Tensori

Platforms: Microsoft Windows

In case you didn't know, I have a second blog where I write about things like music and other non-gaming topics I feel like discussing. Last year, I published an excellent (if I do say so myself) article about a horror film called Skinamarink. That film combined elements of analog horror and liminal spaces to create the atmosphere it boasts, and this film started a sort of fascination within me around these little subgenres of horror. Pools is all about liminal spaces: the concept of the uncanny valley applied to architecture. With that in mind, just like Aquarist, Pools is for one type of person and one type of person only: those people who are fascinated by this type of horror.

Pools is essentially 5 or 6 levels of liminal space design centered around the titular concept. There aren't any monsters or anything resembling danger, so really this is a walking simulator when all is said and done. And....that's kind of all there is to say. The graphics are incredible and if you're bothered by liminal spaces (as I sometimes am), there are plenty of tense moments to be found, but that's everything I've got. Obviously, I don't have enough to give this game a score, so just take my commentary and run with it.

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: ARIKA

Platforms: Nintendo Switch

As I say at the start of every ocean-adjacent game I play, I'm a cheap date. Give me an aquatic setting and you have my attention instantly...however, it doesn't mean I'll enjoy that setting through its conclusion. Endless Ocean: Luminous may very well be the year's laziest game, and that's before you consider the compelling argument that the game was probably created with AI. There are two things you can do in this game: free diving and story missions. Story missions put you in a restricted bit of ocean where you're tasked with finding x amount of some thing inbetween bits of possibly AI-written writing partly with Sims-esque gibberish and partly with an actual AI text-to-speech voice when your AI companion is talking...

And then there's the freediving, wherein you enter a gigantic-but-unvaried ocean space randomly generated and try to scan as many fish as you can. When I say that, I don't mean "as many fish species." I mean as many individual fish. Your goal is to scan as many individual fish as you can in order to unlock progress to the next story mission. There's a small handful of ocean types, but no more than you can count on one hand. So you'll end up swimming through the same maps scanning the same fish and facing the same framerate drops you faced the map beforehand. Half of the time, this will be done in relative silence with only the sound of water in the background, and the other half will be done with the game's one soundtrack piece plays.

So yeah, I don't have much positive to say, and I don't even know how to start scoring this one. Something this game does have going for it is that it's easy to be relaxed by it...but that's all. So just take this as a "Not Recommended" verdict.