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.
