Intro
Annie here!
This week's game was basically my introduction to incremental games as a genre. I've played tons of games with "number go up" and skill trees as a mechanic, but I never realized that could be the whole game.
Fish Lab is super fun and chill to play, and it's wildly underrated, and I feel like that might be due to a lack of demand for incremental games; so let's show it some love.
Review
As of writing, Fish Lab's demo only has 11 reviews, and one of them has this amazing quote:
"The music syncing is not just a bullet point. It matters. The constant little snaps and pulses when you are scanning and progressing give the whole thing this hypnotic rhythm. It is calming, but not sleepy. Busy, but not stressful."
I completely agree with this take. Fish Lab's scanning mechanic is synched to a super chill electronic beat that pulses in rhythm with your scanner in a really satisfying way.
The scanning section is timed, because your scanner has a limited battery that goes down with each beat of the music. This leads into a well-balanced upgrade section based on your money earned by scanning fish.
The sections are well-balanced because you always have enough money for at least one upgrade, if not several, and they always feel impactful in some way. If you're feeling extra relaxed you can even take a moment just to browse through your fish tanks at all your catches. Each fish has a unique name, and some of them even have special traits like Tiny or Mutant.
The game scales in an awesome way; it doesn't take much time to feel that sense of awe from zooming out on something huge that once seemed so small. In a Reddit post, the developer spoke about their inspiration, saying the game was:
"Also inspired by katamari damacy because I love the feeling of keep zooming out to reveal more and more . I thought this idea would be a great fit for a idle game"
Final Thoughts
Consider how good Fish Lab feels to play, it's a shame to me how underrated it is on Steam and social media. It only takes 15 minutes to see the vision, so I highly recommend you try it out!
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