[WARNING: Couple of spoilers here and there]

Back in about 2004 when I was around 3-4 years old I first found this game on Popcap as the free online version. It had no music, and only one area but I remember playing it for hours. It was simple, but it was the perfect blend of tricky mechanics and pacing that kept me coming back.

Fast-forward to about 2012 to when I was around 12 my father had purchased a Popcap collection that included this along with some other favorites of mine like Heavy Weapon. I remember being glued to it for hours. I'd never had so much fun with it as I had with any other game. At the time I had played stuff like XIII, the Sly Coopers, Ace Combat 5, Call of Duty Finest Hour, Medal of Honor Frontline, and some of the classics such as Deus Ex and Half-Life. Yet the music and the simple structure of Insaniquarium gave me a sense of euphoria that I hadn't felt before at the time. Much of it was childhood nostalgia but I remembered at the time admiring the atomspehere and rising difficulty. For being about 11-12 the amount of fish and money required to finish each level was enough of a challenge to encourage me to keep going. I remembered finding the levels in the 4 area to be outright hell. The concepts were simple to follow, the bosses were varied to create some doubt when entering a new level. The music was very cheerful and inviting, setting a friendly environment for the most part and but even the later levels also created a sense of the rising challenge. There's only about 5 tracks but each sets the mood all on its own without too much duplication, with the exception of the main menu music being reused for level 4. At the time, it was a firm favorite that seemed to encompass everything I found to be fun with elements of management, survival, and even a minor shooting portion thrown in. All within a game about feeding fish. It seemed flawless.

Fast-forward to about 2016 when I opened this account. Having been unable to own a computer powerful enough for Steam for years I was supremely curious to see what was available here. When I discovered that the old gems of Popcap were available I snapped it up instantly (Inspite of it being about $80 at the time). I immediately downloaded the favorites: Heavy Weapon, Chuzzle, Hammer Heads, and of course, Insaniquarium. And so the question presented itself, did the game still hold up 5 years later at the age of 17? Well right off the bat I could say that the difficulty certainly was not what I remembered. When was a kid the game took me quite some time to beat as I said I found the level 4 area to be hell quite often. Well after being dedicated to beating it I swept through the game across a few days with a collective time of about 6 hours. The management boiled down to just setting up a system that got you the money you needed without committing fish genocide and staying within your complusory money-burning budget to get each egg shard to complete the level. The bosses themselves were only a minor disturbance especially because I did not remember what type was what. All except for the Squid monster, screw that one. Being invulnerable and then laying waste to countless fish peoples upon normalizing caused more headaches and vexations than I remembered. The convoluted set-up of guppys to guppymunchers to beatle muncher in the level 3 area was both an inviting challenge and a Gordian Knot constructed only with the purpose of slowing down your monopolization of the fish and egg-shard market. Otherwise the levels were still fun. Although shorter on account of me panicking less when fish started turning into skeletons due to Squid and Robot genocide, the fact that they were short kept everything fun and fresh as it meant I didn't have to spend an hour to get through the level. They were long enough for me to enjoy the set-up of the money machine and short enough for me to glide along the levels like the fish I was raising (starving). The music was still as cheery and memorable too. I found myself looking up the tracks afterward and playing them while I was doing other things. The first level especially does a fantastic job and constructing the friendly tone of the game. This game is meant for you to have fun with your fish-slavery and money-grubbing efforts. But holy smokes I need to talk about the Credit music. So when I cut the head off of area 4 I found myself at the big showdown when you need to kill the evil menace sending all the evil monsters to destroy your perfect ecosystems. This battle when even high stakes as your population consisted of your pets, the life-long allies that meant the difference between failure and securing yet another pet. So it was both heart-breaking to see them slaughtered and hectic to keep them alive. When the smoke cleared, I had about 4 survivors. But don't worry, that angel fish you acquired like a level ago purposely stayed out of the fight to keep them alive. So the credits roll as my crew is brought back from the watery grave and in a game with a colorful and bright atmosphere the music is surprisingly somber and sad. It's slow and drags along, filling an empty void with a sense of loss. I really found myself not wanting to leave the game as this music played. For me credits and final boss tracks at their best when I get a sense of loss. If the game is really good and doing its job I should be left wanting more and to never leave in the first place. For how simple it is the credits music really left me in that state. I had to sit through it and absorb it all until the end. It's probably one of the few times I've found myself wanting to sit through a credits screen. For that reason alone I give this game a solid 9/10. For a simple point-and-click management game it does its job really well of giving you a bright atmosphere with a fun challenge filled in. There aren't very many decisions and you won't find yourself regretting your purchases too often but the pacing of the game flows smoothly enough to keep me hooked into capping off every area. With that said my nostalgia did not preserve the difficulty or even the little feeding simulator where you can raise fish for shells and steadily upgrade your community within that tank. That for me took too long to build up any money for anything and if you wanted to get the upgrades for the tank like the Bubblator you needed BIG cash. Cash that you could realisitically only get from doing the other gamemodes. That system would be fine if the virtual tank had more impact on the core gameplay. Otherwise the only motivation for getting said shell currency is for the secret pets which can in itself be the ultimate reward. While I liked killing some time with it it wasn't the Zen Garden from Plants vs Zombies where I could get money at a fairly decent rate for some fantastic new plants and upgrades. All in all the feature is something that you might return to on occassion but I didn't find myself sticking to it long.

So that's it, Insaniquarium. The game about fish-feeding that's so insane, it's kept alive and swimming for over 15 years.