Chillquarium

I'll be straight with you: as someone who stress-tests economic loops in grand-strategy titles for fun, Chillquarium sits about as far from my wheelhouse as a game can get. And yet I kept coming back to it, which tells you something meaningful about what solo developer Ben Reber built here. The structure is a gacha-style idle loop dressed up as an aquarium sim. You open randomized packs of fish cards, drop your fry into a tank, then feed them to accelerate growth from baby to adult. Feeding is manual by default, requiring you to hold right-click and herd fish toward the pellets, though the community has long since documented an Alt-Tab trick that lets the game auto-feed while you are doing something else entirely. Once fish mature, they generate passive ticket-sale income. You reinvest that into packs, unlock saltwater tanks alongside the freshwater ones, and gradually chase rarer tiers: Common through Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythic, and then the color variants layered on top. Normal, painted, golden, rainbow. Getting a golden fish sits around a 1-in-1,000 chance per pull. That number will either read as a satisfying long-term target or a complete non-starter depending entirely on your tolerance for RNG-gated collection. Where the loop works is in its pacing and its lack of predatory friction. There are no microtransactions pressuring you to speed up. Fish grow at 1 XP per second offline, so logging out does not punish you the way some mobile-adjacent games do. Up to three freshwater and three saltwater tanks can be upgraded to hold 100 fish each, which gives the later game a satisfying sense of scale when your tanks are finally full of glittering rarities. The fish artwork is hand-drawn with per-frame swimming animations, and it shows. Watching 50 well-curated fish drift around while you work is genuinely pleasant. Backgrounds, lighting, and decorations can be purchased for aesthetic reasons, though it is worth knowing upfront that none of them affect income or growth rates in any way. The honest criticism is that the economic layer is thin. There is no juggling of supply and demand, no species synergy bonuses, no meaningful tank management decisions beyond "keep it full." Decorations cost significant in-game currency and do nothing mechanical, which feels like a missed design opportunity. The single music track wears out its welcome faster than the collection loop does. Players who want a resource management puzzle will bounce off this quickly because the only decision that matters is which fish to sell and which to lock. The UI is functional but not intuitive, particularly when managing a full roster across multiple tanks. For the audience it is actually built for, though, Chillquarium is a clean execution of a narrow idea. It sits well as a background game, runs offline, has no pay-to-win angle, and the creature-collection pull is real enough that completionists will find themselves chasing rainbow variants long after they thought they were done. Think of it less as a simulation and more as a very pretty, low-maintenance checklist with fish in it. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable. Runs great on Linux after minor tweaks. Based on 13 ProtonDB community reports.

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