My Aquarium
An aquarium that lives along the bottom of your screen while you get on with your day.
by GPG · 23 Dec, 2024 · Steam
My Aquarium does not want your evening. It runs at the bottom of the screen while you are doing other things, which is the entire framing of GPG's December 2024 release: an idle aquarium simulator you can enjoy comfortably from the corner of your eye while you work, browse, or wind down.
What the loop feels like
Your fish live along the bottom edge of your monitor, swimming and begging and doing fish things while your actual work happens above them. You drop in periodically, feed them, and get on with your day, and the tank rewards the check-ins with steady little pulses of progress. That's My Aquarium.
Over days the tank visibly fills out. New species join, backgrounds change, and the little economy of coins turns into a more crowded and colourful strip of water, until it feels less like a game and more like a pet you keep in your taskbar. That's My Aquarium.
How it actually works
Feeding is the heartbeat. Well-fed fish stay healthy and generate passive income, and the coins flow back into the tank: new aquatic life, background themes and structural upgrades, all gated by cash flow in a strictly linear unlock path. Automation items, filters and feeders, arrive as you progress and trim the micromanagement down to nothing. Tank customisation is the visible half of progression, with tank sizes, lighting configurations, flooring textures and decorative objects slowly turning a basic glass box into a curated ecosystem.
Where it stumbles
Our criticism pass drifted to a different aquarium title, so treat this next part as niche-wide rather than game-specific: second-screen aquarium idles live or die on charm, and the Steam reception here is mixed, with a small player base split on whether the tank earns its place on the desktop. The niche's recurring flaws are missing tutorials that drop you in front of an empty tank with no context, and loops that a traditional gamer exhausts within the hour. Anyone wanting actual depth, challenge or long-haul optimization should look elsewhere, because the genre's whole contract is pleasant, shallow accumulation.
Playing it today
My Aquarium is a Windows release on Steam from GPG, with a free demo on the page, and no mobile or browser version found at research time. The cozy-aquarium corner of this site includes Chillquarium for pack-opening collecting and Cozy Aquarium for a similar bottom-of-desk vibe, and Deskquarium takes the concept as literally as it can possibly be taken.
The verdict
A gentle desktop pet in fish form, built for people who want a little life in the corner of the monitor. Feed it daily and it asks for nothing else.
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