Pixel Fish

Pixel Fish was a somewhat charming hybrid of arcade game and incremental number climber, where you control a little fish and must move around with your arrow keys to eat smaller fish (to grow and build evolution currency) and avoid the bigger fish which reduce your hitpoints. There's a lot of unlocks and the progression seems well thought out, as well as options that involve trade-offs, forcing a little bit of thought and player agency into the game, which is a nice move and a little above most of these clicker/idler games. Unfortunately while the pixel fish look a little cute, the technical implementation here was a bust. A choice was made to use obsolete retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. Resolution is locked and can't be changed, and there's no visual or graphics tweaks, so there's no way to improve the very lazy, mediocre visuals. There's no working full screen mode, and maximising the game window doesn't actually scale the game, so it just displays as a postage stamp in the middle of the screen. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for many differently-abled gamers. These flaws push this game far below minimum acceptable standards for PC. While this was free, and surely not the worst free game I've seen on Steam (not least because it was a sincerely and genuinely made amateur/indie game), the developer has removed this from the store.