REVIEW: Surviving grief through routine in Fishbowl's slice of life

Hi reader: Loss of a family member plays a large role in Fishbowl protagonist Alo's story, and in this review. Please take care while reading.

My first experience with death came when my grandma on my mom's side died. I was a kid, and I remember being taken out of school for a week, making a home in a waiting room's strange cubby-like corner, and not being able to cry until it all came out at her funeral, a week after it'd felt like she was going to be alright after all.

Then one of the most affecting experience with death I had was losing my remaining grandma. Because I was much more present for it all. The daily hospital visits, the downturn, the forgetting. I remember being haunted by her lifeless form for months, as she drifted from this plane right as I had the unfortunate timing to peek into the ICU room where she had been transferred.

One of the most frustrating experiences with death I had was an aunt's passing during the COVID-19 pandemic. We mourned her in the only way we could, then, via a Zoom funeral with a bad camera and people who didn't know how to turn their microphones off. Just my mom, my partner, and I staring at a wall in a Filipino cemetery as someone mumbled into a camera.

It still hurt just as much as the others.

So when I say Fishbowl hit several major marks for me, I truly mean it. This narrative-driven life sim is a special project whose writing sneaks up on you and reminds you to live life to the fullest, no matter the circumstances.

​Just the Facts

Developer: imissmyfriends.studio

Publisher: imissmyfriends.studio and Wholesome Games Presents

​Platform(s): PC* and PS5 *denotes platform reviewed on

​Price: $9.99

Release Date: April 2, 2026

Review key provided by publisher.

Fishbowl is imissmyfriends.studio's debut work, coming to us after about five years of development. It started in 2021 when the two-person team of Rhea Gupte and Prateek Saxena decided to try their hand at game dev to explore their feelings of isolation in the wake of COVID-19. In the years since, they gained the partnership of two big allies: PlayStation, through their India Hero Project incubation program, and Wholesome Games as a publishing partner.

It's a game we here at VGG have watched closely for years, after we were able to send our Japanese contingent out to BitSummit to chat with the team about the game in 2023.

Now in 2026, Fishbowl and imissmyfriends.studio are here to help us wade through those unprecedented times one last time. And for once, I don't regret revisiting that time. Mostly.

Fishbowl tells the story of Alo, a 21-year-old in the middle of a cluster of major life events. New job, new city, new house, and new layers of heartache all await her in the wake of her grandmother's shattering death. It's all too much, so Alo swallows her stress, turns away from most of it, and focuses on making it through each day instead. It should be easy to avoid your feelings when you've got a new city to explore, right?

Well, all at once, a global pandemic hits, and boxes of her grandmother's belongings show up at her door. Fate's got other plans, and almost all of them have to do with Alo confronting her pain.

From there on out, Alo figures out a new normal in the wake of the pandemic and slowly sorts through her grandmother's life in the form of boxes and memories. She gradually uncovers past passions and repressed memories, and uses the lessons from past and present to help set up her future. Your choices will help guide Alo's new life, but for the most part, you're along for the ride of her day-to-day across this 8–10 hour narrative journey.

It's a fascinating experience, blinking between comfy cozy silliness with Alo's coworkers and childhood memories and the deep darkness of grief and lost passions. While cheeky references to Drag Race and adolescent memories make up the bulk of your early game hours, suddenly you're reading a piece of poetry written by Alo that stops you in your tracks and has you looking for the nearest tissue. Suddenly, you're remembering your own familial traumas and making a mental note to reach out to your mom by the end of the session.

It's a fascinating experience, blinking between comfy cozy silliness with Alo's coworkers and childhood memories and the deep darkness of grief and lost passions.

Fishbowl is a rollercoaster of emotions, the kind that can certainly induce whiplash — but in the jolting way we're all intimately acquainted with, having recently experienced the life-uprooting nature of COVID-19. Its examination of the pandemic doesn't give players the comfort of distance; its slice of life experience is grounded in the routine and mundanity of surviving one day to the next alone in your apartment. This makes some of the game hard to experience. Hard to relive.

But simultaneously, it celebrates the joy and power of humanity and how our relationships can help fulfill us in these difficult times. One of my favorite parts comes about two-thirds of the way through, when a community rallies around to support a friend by raising money for their cause. It's a reminder that the way we made it through those "unprecedented" times were the people, the friends and family who helped us up when we were down.

Whether it's calls for the sake of checking in, nostalgic memories of childhood toys and games, or just a quiet moment alone, Fishbowl manages to give the light in Alo's life a focus along with its more somber parts.

The team mostly manages to keep a balance, but especially as the game turns into its final moments, this is definitely a heavy experience. But I champion, as Fishbowl's publisher Wholesome Games does, that wholesome/cozy/comfy can contain many kinds of experiences, and the more we expand the definition, the better off we are.

The familial and community-oriented warmth found inside by the time credits roll is well worth the ride . . . but tissue boxes are definitely recommended to make it through without getting snot and tears on your controller by the end.

On the gameplay side, Fishbowl is fairly straightforward. If I had to categorize this game under any of the tight-fitting genre terms, I'd call this a routine life sim. At the onset of the pandemic, as Alo finds herself stuck indoors, you quickly find yourself stuck in a cycle of events that regulate her emotional state amidst all the swirling emotions around her.

Wake up, brush your teeth, use the toilet, take a shower. Make breakfast, drink coffee, eat a slice of toast, wash the dishes. Tidy the house, unpack one of your grandmother's boxes, finish a project for work. Make a call, doomscroll a bit, binge-watch a show. Each task will improve or tank Alo's mood, and after a point, the game never outright asks you to do any of it. You'll eventually get a checklist of tasks you can do each day, but it's up to you how you'll carry Alo through.

As you influence her mood, a meter will either fill or deplete to take you up and down her various . . . let's call them mood tiers. Different mood tiers unlock different dialogue options, and even block you out of or lock you into certain activities. When the game starts and Alo's not feeling great, doomscrolling and binge-watching shows are readily available and you can't even back out of them once you click in. As her mood improves, eventually she realizes neither activity is all that good for her and she's able to find other things to fill her day.

Each action comes with some simple contextual minigame of either arrow presses that coordinate to the action or timing-based button presses and holds. Simple, quick, eventually repetitive — especially if you're hyperproductive like me, committed to doing every task every day.

Alo's days are punctuated by two bigger minigames. Her remote work entails rhythm game-style video editing, matching video elements to the correct rows on beat. Then, there's the unpacking minigame that sees Alo sorting objects in her grandmother's boxes to unearth something buried at the bottom — a simple slide puzzle that, if it's not your jam, can be skipped in the accessibility options.

Video editing gets Alo some face time with her coworkers, a fun series of personalities who all work for the famous content creator Sitara, and your performance in these sections are tracked and remarked upon as you progress and may even factor into where the story goes in the end.

But it's within her grandmother's boxes that Fishbowl's meat is found. As Alo unpacks and logs these totems from her grandmother's life, memories will trigger and transport you back to key moments of her childhood. Exploring these, you'll uncover what makes Alo tick and slowly uncover something bubbling beneath the surface of what looks to be otherwise happy moments. There's a growing dread to these memories that feels like a ticking time bomb and makes each new memory feel juicier as the game goes on.

You're given more to do each day as you find new things in your grandma's belongings, like unlocking cooking when you find some old recipes. Still, the core loop never really shakes things up too much. But the story's the heart of Fishbowl, and it's well worth it to stick with these tasks to see each new revelation and story beat through to the end.

Fishbowl's dreamy pixel art aesthetic lulls you into a sense of cozy comfort. A soft fuzzy filter rests over many scenes, particularly Alo's memories, and genuine old-school lo-fi beats make up much of the game's soundtrack. Sprites for children are teeny and lower detail, making them adorable little chibi versions of the full detailed video call sprites you see whenever you call one of your childhood friends.

And when the darkness seeps into the narrative, it's accompanied by a glitchy goopy darkness that pools around the environment and puts you on edge.

I did wish for a few more of the game's beautiful full-screen pixel art tableaus (I'm sure they were incredibly labor-intensive, so understandably limited), but enjoyed Fishbowl's marvelous look at every scale it offered.

In this special debut, imissmyfriends.studio utilizes every bit of their past experiences as designers and artists to offer something simultaneously brand-new and familiar: something that lightly defies the trappings of any one genre and attempts a more modern telling of the kinds of stories some of my favorite games have tried in the past.

Fishbowl was well worth the wait, a narrative experience that is painful both in its relevance in a time of prevailing loneliness that still ripples out from the COVID-19 pandemic and in its honest and vulnerable exploration of grief.

At the time of playing, I ran into a crashing issue that dampened the game's emotional final chapter, but a few hiccups along the way don't diminish the shine of imissmyfriends.studio's debut. It is an easy recommendation for those gamers among us who aren't afraid to get a little weepy and to let games remind us of the good and bad of our lives.

Video Games Are Good and Fishbowl is . . . GREAT. (8/10)

+ cozy slice-of-life vibes complete with lo-fi beats, emotionally resonant story about grief, a grounded (albeit with mystical influences) time capsule of the COVID social isolation era

- actions and minigames can become repetitive, flip-flopping tone can be hard to get a handle on, crashing issue hindered my experience at the story's end

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