Any Fish

I went in with genuinely open eyes on this one, because the smallest Steam pages sometimes carry quiet charm. Any Fish is a drag-and-drop match-3 built in Construct 2, asking you to line up fish tiles on a 2D board, collect jellyfish for points, and chase a high score with no level structure beyond your own patience. The loop is about as stripped-back as the genre gets: swap adjacent pieces, match three or more of the same fish, watch them clear, repeat. There is no progression system, no power-ups, no combo chains to engineer, and no fail state beyond the board running out of valid moves. It is, in the developer's own spirit, a time-killer and nothing more. The visual presentation is cheerful enough. Bright fish illustrations sit against a simple aquatic backdrop, and the color palette is clear, which matters in a match-3 where reading the board quickly is the whole skill ceiling. The music is looping and unobtrusive, sitting somewhere between a mobile storefront jingle and the ambient aquarium soundtrack you hear at a dentist's office. It does not distract. Whether it adds anything is a fair question. As someone who tends to listen closely to how small games score themselves, this one keeps quiet in a way that neither enchants nor offends. The core problem here is scope, or the absence of it. Match-3 as a genre lives and dies by the texture it wraps around its basic mechanic. Bejeweled earns replays through mode variety. Puzzle Quest earns them by grafting RPG stakes onto each swap. Any Fish offers the mechanic alone, with a single mode and a numerical score as the only feedback. The jellyfish collection element hints at a secondary objective but functions as little more than a bonus counter tacked onto the main loop. Players who genuinely enjoy pure score-attack puzzle sessions in short bursts might find a few minutes of genuine idling here, but anyone hoping for the kind of quiet craft that makes a small game feel considered will feel the absence of that intentionality. What is hardest to overlook is that this reads unmistakably as a ported mobile prototype rather than a game designed for the platform it sits on. Construct 2 is a capable engine in the right hands, and plenty of wonderful small games have been built with it. Any Fish does not push it. There are no Steam-specific features, no controller remapping details listed, and the spec requirements are so minimal they read as a formality. The developer clearly set out to make something light and accessible, and light and accessible it is. But lightness without intention tends to feel hollow after the first five minutes, and that is roughly the ceiling here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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