With the major 1.3 update to Chillquarium earlier this week, I have an excuse to pull out an even stronger recommendation for this relaxing digital fishtank-stroke-trading-card-booster-pack-opening simulator.
The Basics
Ben Reber's Chillquarium is an idle collection game that lets you fill your digital fishtanks with a variety of freshwater and saltwater swimmy creatures: primarily fish, but also snails, whales, squid, and more. The extra bit of flair is the RPG-style rarity system that ties into the progression, powered by a simple but addicting loop of passively earning money, then spending it on trading-card style booster packs to collect more fish.
In short Chillquarium lets you earn money in two ways: selling fully-grown fish, or keeping them in your tank to generate you money over time, every game tick. That's really the bulk of it, and the rest of the game is exactly how that progression works out. Different fish come from different packs at different price-points. Certain fish will command higher rarities, with the benefit being higher sell prices or better money generation. Every fish can appear in normal, painted (alt-color), golden, and rainbow variants. Find a Legendary or Mythic fish in one of those rarer variants and watch your money multiply.
That's the essence of it. Everything else in the game is either in service to that progression loop, such as larger tanks, or are cosmetic customizations, like the different colored sand and little props that help give some extra life to the watery background.
The Hook
The hook to Chillquarium is its simplicity. Actively playing entails popping open booster packs for new fish, then selling off the less-rare adult fish you already have to fund the next pack and open up space for the newcomers. Afterwards, you can simply sit back and watch your fish, or quit the game and let the offline passive income roll in as you sleep.
A major boon to Chillquarium is how well it's optimized. The stylized "filtered pixel art" look to all the art is charmingly retro without any sharp edges or jagged lines, and the look is lightweight and performant to boot. Chillquarium is built in the Godot engine and runs smoothly with a staggerly low resource footprint. I have to bring this up because I have a pet peeve for idlers or desktop companion games that make the rest of your system chug, defeating a large purpose (and draw) of the genre. Chillquarium is a shining example of how good we could have it, with a barely-there level of resource usage that makes it a no-brainer to keep this game running in the background long-term without any guilt.
So, you have a stylish and cute game that runs smoothly, is well optimized, rewards active and passive play, offers offline progress, and gives you an addictive booster-pack-opening experience on demand, no microtransactions involved. Recommending Chillquarium is an easy call.
The Updates
I'll bring up the 1.3 game update from earlier this month because it's indicative of its ongoing support. As a game that initially began as a hobby project, Chillquarium does not receive live-service levels of new content frequently, but it still has been regularly fixed and improved since its 2023 release, which are a treat for longer-term fans and gives reason to revisit.
Version 1.3 in particular addresses some balance issues with the gold variant and adds some much-needed QoL to make acquiring them easier, an appreciated update for completionists like myself. I cannot emphasize enough how necessary these changes were, and it's encouraging to see the developer responding to player feedback with these changes.
As of 1.3, Chillquarium has 182 different base fish species. Multiplied out across the common, painted, gold, and rainbow variants, that's 728 entries in your in-game compendium for you to fill out, and this doesn't account for the fact that some fish have multiple different color variations to their painted versions.
Following the 1.3 update, Chillquarium is a game I can not only recommend playing casually, but finally also recommend playing for achievement completion. It'll still be a little work, but having personally spent dozens of hours pre-1.3 trying to grind out golds, I can say it's exponentially easier now.
Bottom Line
...and sinker.
Chillquarium's a good time, a nice atmospheric piece to have in the background and a rather compelling collect-em-all experience when you decide you want to spend your banked-up money to open up some more fish booster packs. The 1.3 update effectively patches out the worst of the completionist frustrations, and the game today presents an enjoyable low-pressure experience. I don't even like fish but I have over 70 hours and counting in this little game, all fully deserved.