Mango's Fisharium

I was enjoying this game right up until I learned they used ChatGPT to help them make it. Please just use your own creativity to make games, I want to connect with a person and not AI.

Okay, it's a decent game, passably serviceable for the price. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it for multiple reasons. First of all, lack of AI disclosure. Fisharium's end credits notably give a special thanks to ChatGPT for coding assistance despite the fact nothing on the store page indicates this. This would explain some of the visual errors I noticed when playing the game; most notably, scrolling the skill tree or result screen causes the UI to flicker. Second, as far as I can tell, the game won't run in the background like most incrementals would. This means idling becomes tedious, as you need to keep the game focused in order to idle, which defeats the point of idling to begin with. I prefer incrementals with active gameplay myself but this is clearly an active/idle hybrid. The lack of a reasonable idle mode is a massive detriment to the game. Third, there is no option for a native windowed mode and if you force windowed mode through Steam properties or other means, you cannot resize the window. This was frustrating for me since I rely on windowed mode for accessibility purposes. I would imagine this might have been due to the aforementioned ChatGPT use, since it seems po…

Mango's Fisharium is a charming incremental fishing game built around a straightforward but satisfying idea: catch fish, grow a collection, improve your equipment, and gradually turn small earnings into increasingly ridiculous numbers. Developed and published by Evrac Studio, the game avoids the enormous time commitment associated with many idle and incremental titles. Instead, it delivers a relatively compact progression journey where new discoveries and upgrades arrive frequently enough to keep the experience moving at a comfortable pace. Fishing provides the foundation of the entire gameplay loop. Players travel between more than ten fishing locations while searching for over fifty different species. Every successful catch contributes to progression in some way, whether by expanding the collection or helping generate resources for further improvements. There is little unnecessary complexity surrounding the process, making it easy to understand what you should be working toward. Better equipment leads to greater efficiency, greater efficiency produces more resources, and those resources can then be reinvested into additional upgrades. It is a familiar incremental structure, but …

A very nice and short game from a solo developer, with heart. Just finished it and was touched by the messages at the end credits. Hope you continue to make more!

Fun little incremental. Reminds me of a game I used to play on my phone.

I ended up beating this game in about 5 1/2 hours with about another hour trying to get enough shiny fish for the 100%. In all, it's an okay game, and generally enjoyable. It can feel a little grindy in the middle but speeds up a lot with the right upgrades in the skill tree. It's possible to treat this as a semi-idle game at that point though so you can afk a bit to speed things up. The only downside really is that it really doesn't stand out very much in any area. I personally wouldn't get this game by itself, but as part of the bundle, I feel like it's worth playing through. Plus the Master Healer Kale game I found very enjoyable so definitely the way to buy this game. Definitely worth the dollar to enjoyment ratio either way being about 2-3 play hours per dollar for this game.