Fish-Click Squad!

Most idle games are loneliness engines: you and the spreadsheet, alone together. Fish-Click Squad!, by Cool Car Studio, is an argument that the missing ingredient was company. It is a multiplayer idler on Steam from March 2025 where you and your friends buy fish fry, pat them until they are visible from space, then net them and let them swim around a shared viewing tank. Yes, patting the fish: touching a fish speeds its growth, so the core verb of this game is stroking aquatic creatures while chatting with whoever else is in the room.

What the loop feels like

You buy a strange young aquatic creature, and you pat it, and it grows a little. Coins from caring fund rarer fry, and the rarest creatures are the ones that quietly earn while nobody is looking at them. That's Fish-Click Squad!.

Your friend wanders in, pats your fish too, and the room fills up with half-grown sea life that everyone contributed to. Then you drop the fishnet over a fully-grown fish and it is released into the viewing area to swim freely forever, which is somehow more moving than it has any right to be. That's Fish-Click Squad!.

The systems doing the work

Underneath the patting there is a real if shallow economy. Coins buy fry of increasing rarity and value; rarer creatures are the income generators; and idle features, cat divers and multipliers, automate the care for anyone too busy at work to pat fish personally. Clicking or touching accelerates growth stages and pays out directly, so experienced players front-load active patting sessions and transition to idle setups when stepping away. Multiplayer rooms can be friends-only or open to strangers, and some rewards scale with the squad, so progression is at least partly a cooperative affair. The developer has been visibly present in the game's Reddit threads, patching feedback from r/incremental_games and r/IndieGaming, which is rarer than it should be in this bracket.

Where it stumbles

The community's central criticism is the one that matters: click power never scales. A click is worth the same at minute one and hour forty, so the snowball that makes clickers feel great never arrives, and the pace stays locked. The ticket machine gets called lacklustre, and content runs out once the main creature pool is unlocked. It is an afternoon game, and everyone involved seems to know it. Even the patting, the one inexhaustible pleasure, eventually becomes background maintenance once the idle features take over the chore entirely.

Playing it today

Fish-Click Squad! is a Windows release on Steam with online co-op; we found no verified phone version. For single-player depth after the social hour ends, Tap Heroes goes much further, and LurkBait Twitch Fishing is the multiplayer fishing idle with the bigger community.

The verdict

A charming shared fishbowl that trades long-term progression for short-term company, and mostly gets away with it. Bring friends, pat responsibly, and let the rare ones swim.