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.