NEO AQUARIUM - The King of Crustaceans -

I went in expecting a curiosity and came out genuinely charmed by the audacity of it all, even as I acknowledged the rough edges stacking up around me. NEO AQUARIUM is Calappa Games' first release, and it carries every mark of a debut: a premise so singular it could only have been born from total creative freedom, paired with execution that occasionally forgets the player needs a foothold. The setup, briefly: humanity has been slicing off chunks of ocean and storing them in dimensionally linked aquariums for sport. Over time, the crustaceans inside evolved to match the threat, and now they fire lasers, molt to heal severed limbs, self-amputate appendages to shrink their hitbox, and charge power meters to unleash special attacks. It plays something like a slow, underwater Virtual-On, with crabs and spiny lobsters in place of mechs. There are roughly ten fighters, each built around a genuinely distinct concept. The Corn Barnacle cannot move freely but spawns up to ten clones that cling to surfaces and attack from multiple angles. The Hermit Crab is near-invulnerable inside its shell, which can be broken, forcing you to race it to the next shell before it recovers. The Snow Crab and King Crab favor range; the Mantis Shrimp (Squilla) leans melee and punishes hard on approach. Meter management runs through all of it: meter builds on hits given and received, and spending it wrong while limbless means you are a sitting target until the gauge refills. The Aquarium Edit mode lets you place creatures and terrain pieces earned through Story Mode into your own custom arena, and those placed organisms will actually intervene in fights on your behalf. It is a quietly lovely little system that hints at a richer game lurking inside. The problems are real, and I will not wave them away. Keyboard controls are genuinely unworkable; a controller is not optional, it is mandatory. The UI is poorly organized and explains almost nothing: environmental systems like water temperature and oxygen saturation appear on the HUD but their practical effect on battles is left entirely to guesswork. Story Mode bookends each fight with pseudo-philosophical commentary from characters named things like "Aristotle Cocopuff" and "Uncle Keef," and the humor lands somewhere between charming and trying-too-hard. Most reviewers across the years have landed on the same honest verdict: the concept carries the experience further than the execution deserves, and depth shallows out after one to two hours of story runs. The roster's small size means you see most of the game's ideas before you have time to fall in love with any one of them. And yet: the community sentiment over its ten-year Steam life has held at roughly 80 percent positive across a modest but loyal player base. The soundtrack gets called out warmly and consistently, and it earns that. The tone the music sets underwater is genuinely atmospheric in a way that plain weirdness alone could not produce. If you come to it the right way, which is to say with a controller, low competitive expectations, and maybe a second human being in local split-screen, it rewards the curiosity. It is unambiguously Calappa's roughest work, a proof-of-concept that their later titles Ace of Seafood and Fight Crab would refine. Treat it like that and it offers something no other game on the store quite offers: the specific, serene joy of being a barnacle that fires plasma from orifices at a lobster in a haunted fish tank.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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