Tap Tap Fish

er I cannot close an app on my phone so I am going to have disrupt The White Pube’s regular art criticism programming to review a PHONE GAME which is a dream come true anyway and deal with it because i luv to expand my CV, i mean, my horizons. but I really have to write about it. I get into bed to be good and sleep but i open it, I wake up in the morning and play it before I live. If I’m meeting up with someone I’m always ten minutes early and they’re always ten minutes late but now it’s fine because I have something to wash away the time.

Tap Tap Fish by AbyssRium begins with a smiling mountain ~ ~ /\ ~ ~ in the centre of ur new empty aquarium. it’s very beautifully designed ah. The mountain is called the Lonely Corallite and it chats and checks up on you throughout the gameplay, sometimes offering game tips, other times checking in like ‘are you taking good care of yourself?’ in a tone that reminds me of the twitter account @aloebud, if you’re familiar. The mountain shoots Vitality out the top of its head, second by second. Vitality is the sweet name for experience points in Tap Tap Fish. If you tap the screen, you can get XP points on demand;; thus if you tap a lot u can get a £fuck £tonne. you can cash Vitality in to level up the Lonely Corallite and have it produce a higher rate of Vitality,, or u can use it to purchase and unlock different fish and coral 2 populate your aquarium. Every fish and plant produces different amounts of Vitality, and they can all be levelled up;;; whenever they reach their next level, Vitality amt increases by 200%. {I have four sea butterflies that float about in the background like transparent bats. I love their gang. i googled and they actually exist. i got a hammerhead shark this morning. i’m tapping towards a blue whale}. as with the nature of level-based games, it takes more experience points and time to get to each successive level but that’s fiiine and necessary and for some reason I love that specific meditative/repetitive action. used to b disciplined and prepared when I played Pokemon and carefully level my party up between gym battles so that I never lost - but it was never straining or boring, it felt so protective. and like Pokemon actually, there’s a transparent sort of pokedex with Tap Tap Fish in which you can see what’s left to unlock ahead of you. it’s like being able to feel the edges and ends of everything that’s going to happen in the little future of your aquarium. and it means the idea of winning here is different. As a player, I wanna fill my aquarium and unlock some hidden fish and change the water colour to a light pink once I have enough gems to customise it for example. if i want to unlock the blue whale, I know i gotta invest Vitality between my coral and the Lonely Corallite.

There is a thorough and constantly updated walkthrough online here if you want to get into it and discover some secrets like, if u tap the top left section of the screen 5000 times you can unlock a narwhal 8-) but you don’t need to go there if you don’t wanna, u can just colour within the lines.

i fuck with these achievements - think about that relative to how most games have you levelling up to be stronger and fighting bigger bosses. to be honest I have enough mental health and job stresses to feel bad about my game performance too; n I cherish the app because it’s diverting and gentle. it’s an in-between thing to do with my fingers and eyes while I’m having some granola or zoning out on a train. Zarina plays it too and loves it more than Neko Atsume. With Tap Tap Fish there is no risk, there is none of the stress of the RPG, of fights or puzzles or action. it’s incremental and comfortably linear, the endgame is just to nurture your environment. i think I love it because I cannot fail

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