Some games can help you escape from reality. Others can help you confront it. Fishbowl is very much the latter.
A narrative-focused game by imissmyfriends.studio that began as a pandemic project, Fishbowl approaches COVID-19’s lockdown era with the precision of a period piece. It’s not the first video game to grapple with the pandemic, but it’s one of the few I’ve played to ditch grand sci-fi metaphors for slice-of-life anxiety. The grounded meditation on social isolation is so familiar, in fact, that I imagine some players might not be ready to return to that dark place so soon. Fishbowl understands that fear. It wants to help you unpack it rather than keep it trapped in a box under your bed.
Fishbowl unfolds day by day over the course of one month. Alo, a young poet in the throes of writer’s block, has just moved to a new city away from her friends and family and started a new job as a video editor. Unfortunately, that big life change just so happens to coincide with an unnamed disease forcing the world into lockdown. And it’s also happening weeks after Alo’s grandmother passed away, a death that she had yet to fully grieve. That whirlwind of anxiety leaves Alo in a tailspin as she tries to find a new daily rhythm while fighting off the occasional panic attacks.
It’s not just Alo’s brain that’s cluttered; so is her cramped one-bedroom apartment, where the entire game takes place from a top-down view. The game’s title refers to the fact that her “roommate” is a childhood toy, a talking fish in a bowl that tries its best to repress Alo’s dark emotions, but it’s also a good descriptor of her apartment. She’s in a pixelated fish tank with little to do. How many times can you doomscroll on the couch, like a goldfish circling the one plastic plant in its tiny environment? It may be a familiar feeling for anyone who found themselves trapped in a small apartment during lockdown.
To make that claustrophobia worse, Alo’s floor space is covered in boxes her mother had shipped over, each filled with trinkets tied to loaded memories of her grandmother. Their presence makes Alo’s daily life more inconvenient. The longer she refuses to unbox them via a quick tile-sliding minigame and confront the memories inside, the harder it is to go about her day to day. The path to finding a new normal runs through unpacking her grief, quite literally.
With that clever bit of visual design in place, Fishbowl unfolds as a close-quarters life sim that’s all about piecing together a routine amid the mess. At first, it’s overwhelming. There’s so much that Alo can do in a day. Brushing her teeth, making coffee, doing the laundry, watering the dying roses on her balcony — everything is represented as a simple button-input minigame, and they appear on a daily checklist that gets longer as the game goes on. Each task raises her mood a little at a time, gradually lifting her out of a deep depression throughout the month. You can also choose to ignore those tasks and remain in a gloomy funk, if you wish.
Alo’s mood dictates what dialogue options are available to her during video chats with her mother, friends, and co-workers. Fishbowl makes it clear that there are no wrong choices or endings; instead, it understands that people process their emotions at different paces.
For me, the first step towards guiding Alo to recovery was creating a repeatable routine. That’s what worked for me in 2020, so why not pay it forward? After a few days of blindly doing some tasks here and there, I started to develop a structure. Wake up, take a shower, make breakfast, water the plants, and then log into work where I cut videos for clients via a short color-matching minigame splayed out over an editing timeline. The more I commit that sequence of chores to memory, the easier it becomes to cram everything into one day and maximize my mood. Like so many aspects of Fishbowl, it’s a sharp bit of storytelling achieved through play, even if the minigames themselves aren’t terribly engaging.
That’s one challenge down. The next is finding a way to stay connected with the world through screens. That’s not so tough either, once one of Alo’s friends reminds her to call every once and a while. By taking the time to ring a friend or Alo’s mother, Fishbowl weaves in some additional color as people adapt to the pandemic in different ways. There, we hear familiar stories of livestreamed fundraisers, inconsiderate roommates breaking quarantine, and more. Sometimes it leads to some difficult conversations with Alo’s mother that drop her mood, but those conversations are important too. No setback is insurmountable, and it’s always worth checking in on somebody rather than hiding in isolation.
These parts of Alo’s day-to-day, so full of gentle realism, turn Fishbowl into a reminder of lessons still ingrained in me from years that feel both distant and like they just happened yesterday. The meat of it, though, comes from how all of that intersects with Alo’s grief. Losing someone you love is hard. Losing them during a moment of global turmoil is even harder. How can you expect to properly process those emotions through FaceTime eulogies, or when you can’t cry in your mother’s arms? There are years’ worth of deaths that were silently grieved in apartments, rather than in the embrace of loved ones.
Fishbowl is a celebration of progress. No matter how small, no matter how slow.
Fishbowl is at its most effective when it’s exploring that idea, rather than running through pandemic learnings. Each day, Alo gets the courage to open one of the boxes cluttering her apartment. After solving the bite-sized tile puzzle inside each one, she unlocks a memory. Birthdays, time spent at her family tea shop, the day she found out her grandmother was sick. They all happen out of order, a hodgepodge of happy and painful memories that flood back to her in fits and spurts. Even ones that seem joyful have a tendency to trigger a surreal panic-attack sequence — something that Alo’s fishy pal is overeager to repress in its childlike naivete. They don’t just hurt Alo; they often cause her mood meter to drastically drop, a mechanical representation of a depressive backslide.
That’s where the powerful balancing act of Fishbowl comes to the surface. It’s a story about finding time in your hectic life to confront all emotions, good and bad. Alo’s memories are painful, but she needs to face them. It’s the only way she’ll be able to process the death of a woman who meant the world to her, and get her head back on straight in the process. Yes, it’s going to hurt. There will be regressive slumps on the journey to healing. But you can always build back, so long as you’re willing to put the time and effort into taking care of yourself along the way. Make yourself a meal at night, take care of the roses, play a few minutes of a game every now and then. Even the most mundane daily tasks can clear space in your life so you can focus on unpacking the bigger boxes in your head.
At eight hours, Fishbowl runs long for what it has to say. Its COVID life lessons make themselves fully known by the halfway point, and the minigame routines left me with some cabin fever eventually. (Another way that Fishbowl is an accurate representation of the lockdown era, even if unintentional.) The moments of emotional revelation can feel overwritten next to the elegant way the design communicates the same ideas through play.
And then there’s Alo’s amateur poetry, which takes an adulthood story into YA territory. It’s a little cringe-inducing, yes, but it’s also home to Fishbowl’s most sincere takeaway. Every day, Alo can try to face her writer’s block by putting pen to page. It never seems to work; she always scraps it and her mood drops as a result, just as it does when she unpacks a box. Why keep doing it? It’s a mechanical setback every time, and it would be easier to max Alo’s mood if you never try at all.
I figured that out early, but I tried every single day anyway. Even on days I knew it wouldn’t work, I found time to sit down at the desk and follow the familiar button prompts for writing a few lines and crumpling up the pages. I didn’t care if I failed. I knew I’d never have a chance of succeeding if I didn’t try at all.
At the end of every day, regardless of how badly things went or how far Alo’s mood dipped, the same message flashes on screen: “No matter what, you got through the day.” Fishbowl is a celebration of progress. No matter how small, no matter how slow. So long as you get up to meet the next day’s challenges, that’s a victory.
Fishbowl will be released April 2 on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Wholesome Games Presents. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
