Shark Game

Shark Game begins, as all great incrementals do, with a single button that says Catch Fish. You are a shark in a strange blue sea, and by the end you command a reef-spanning workforce of sharks, rays, crabs, shrimp, lobsters, dolphins, whales, chimaeras, octopuses and eels, each species running its own worker, breeder, specialist and machine chains. Cirrial built the original for the Seamergency 2014 jam; since 2020 community developers spencers145 and Toby222 have carried it forward, and the care shows in a game that hides one of the genre’s best stories underneath its numbers.

What the loop feels like

The first scene is the hunt. You click fish out of the water, buy a second shark, and the second shark hunts while you click, until the clicking becomes supervising and the reef becomes an economy.

The second scene is the migration. Layers have opened, the ocean has darkened, the story underneath the numbers has started asking questions you did not agree to answer, and you spend Migrator artifacts to wash up in a new ocean with your workforce remembered and the water changed. That’s Shark Game.

Where it stumbles

Honest gaps first: the hub hosts three versions, New Frontiers, a remaster, and the original, and the differences between them are documented in code and community threads rather than a manual, so this entry describes the game’s shared spine. Beyond that, the early game is slow by modern standards, and the story’s patience is a feature some players will read as a flaw. The pitch that matters most is in the title of the genre’s fondest description of it: this is the free incremental that actually ends, with an authored win condition waiting at the final Gate.

Playing it today

It is free and open source under MIT at the official hub, which routes to New Frontiers, the remaster and the original, with sources on GitHub from the continuation team. For more story-cloaked incrementals, A Dark Room and Kittens Game are the essential companions.

The verdict

One of the best story-cloaked incrementals ever made, and a model of community stewardship: three versions, one hub, a decade of care, and an ending.