As a full time office worker, me and idle games have been friends a long time. Usually I'd play these on my phone, especially when I commuted into a real office. When I started working remotely, it took me a while to realize that I could play them on my PC too. Enter Chillquarium. It's a simple and lovely thing to buy an idle game for under $5 and to never see a single ad or microtransaction that the genre is usually littered with. The art is cute, the music is nice. Same species fish seem to group together, which is a clever touch, even if it's not always realistic. I love fish (absolutely crazy about them) and I have real fish in my life, so I don't need a simulator in my games. Anyone looking for realism should look elsewhere. What this game offers is a casual collecting experience that scratches the gacha itch without any of the traps and is totally finite. You raise fish, make money, buy more fish, upgrade tanks, decorate them if you feel like it, and keep doing it until you've collected everything and/or customized your tanks the way you want. When you're done, you're done.

I play this game on and off when I feel like it and likely won't be truly done anytime soon but that's just how I'm choosing to play. I don't think binging or obsessively collecting rare fish would be a fun way to go about it, but some people do this and are usually the ones to say the game doesn't have enough going on in it. I don't think that's quite right, but it's not exactly wrong either. Chillquarium does what it does very well, but it is a simple game. More features would be a welcome addition, particularly in tank customization. The UI also leaves a lot to be desired; it functions technically but is far from intuitive. Those are my only complaints and it's why I'm rating this 4 stars instead of 5. I don't expect the world from a game like this and what Chillquarium promises, it does deliver on.

It's a decent chill game where you collect and grow fish. As you gain more money, you move onto more different types of fish and more tanks to grow them in. That's the whole gameplay loop in a nutshell.

Now there are different rarities of fish to collect (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythic) and different color variants as well (Normal, Painted, Golden, Rainbow). All the achievements are tied to collecting the color variants of the Fish. (Collecting all from each species, each species painted, and each species gold.)

This is where the game gets annoying as you have a 1/1000 chance of getting a gold fish and even less of getting a rainbow fish. Most of the end-game, achievement collecting is just spam buying fish and selling them until you get the golds you need. It's okay.

I haven't played that many Idle Games yet, so I can't reference that many of them for this review, but I really enjoyed this game. It is extremely ''simple'' but quite effective.

You just keep buying fish packs and grow them with time. Once they are grown up you can sell them to buy more fish or keep them and they earn you money by the second!

There is different tanks, decorational elements and ofc fish.

Short:

(++) The thrill of getting different rarities of fish in the packets!

(+) Variety of fish (types, colors, palinted, golden, rainbow)

(+ -) Though the game is extremely simple and you don't need to do a lot, which is the point of an idle game, I did wish for a few more things to do than just sell and buy fish!

(+ -) Decorations are cute but i'd like to customize more!

(+ - ) The achievements are a pain and they will take ages, but I suppose the developer was nice by not including rainbow and painted mythics haha

( - ) The game is lovely but it does get a bit repetitive. Still very much worth the small prize and a lovely game that is worth checking into once a day.

Chillquarium is an idle game where you load it up every day for 10 minutes, sell duplicate fish, and then close it. The fish are static pngs that float around the tank towards your cursor. You can buy more and bigger tanks, as well as static pngs to add as decoration.
This game added nothing to my day every day and I kept playing it for a few months because it was just 10 minutes a day and it wasn't offensive or anything but I don't think I will ever think of this game again after uninstalling it.
There is nothing here for you beyond just something to kill 10 minutes a day. It is a game that won't surprise or engage you. It's not meant to do that, I guess, but I imagine that if the fish were actually animated or the mechanics were in any way interesting I would feel rather positively about the game.
I don't wanna be mean to the game, but it feels like the design document began and ended with "chill vibes". There are too many small problems with the game - fish feeding barely works, the game has no sell duplicates button, the value tab constantly bugs out and displays incorrectly - for it to be this simple. You could do worse, but cookie clicker is free.