Save the Fish! A Deep Dive into 11 Mobile Pull-Pin Games.

If you’ve ever played a mobile app, sooner or later you’re going to see a very particular ad. There’s a fish that needs to be saved — from sharks, poison, lava for some reason, dehydration — and all you need to do is pull a pin to let good stuff happen. But the finger on the screen is doing it ALL WRONG! And NOW THE FISH IS DEAD!

Obviously you want to help. But there are so MANY fish saving games in the App Store! You just want to save one silly fish, but which should you choose?

I downloaded them all. Well, until I got tired of looking for more of them at least. There are a lot of them.

Save the Fish: The Real Game by Mesiba Games

I chose this one because it looked like it had the best chance of being the one in the ad. True to the name, it does offer increasingly difficult sliding pin puzzles. You earn currency after each puzzle; the game gives you a choice between a lesser reward and no ads, or a greater reward, but you have to watch an ad. Plot twist: No matter which you choose, you get to watch an ad. Combined with the continuous ads running at the bottom of the screen, there’s a lot of ad watching if you like this game. Occasionally you level up and have an opportunity to gain a new skin for your fish, at the cost of you watching an ad. There’s a theme here.

Ads aside, the game does just what it says. The skins are cute, some of the puzzles have non-obvious solutions, and you can pay to get rid of the ads if you just want the pure puzzle experience.

Fishdom by Playrix

Fishdom is the game the sliding pin puzzle ads send you to. It’s actually an aquarium simulator, which was admittedly made pretty clear by the description in the app store.

The very first thing Fishdom teaches you is how to buy things from the store, and explains that your aquarium will be sad unless you earn coins to buy new decorations.

Unsurprisingly, you earn coins via a match-3 game. Once you’ve cleared the match-3 game, you are rewarded with a mini-game, which is a SAVE A FISH PUZZLE! Just like the one in the ad. If you’re looking for the exact same game as in the ad, it is Fishdom you want. You’ll have to play a lot of other mini games to earn a play of the save the fish game, but at least in my time playing it, I saw no ads.

Save the Fish – Pull Pin by Timuz

This one is a pure pull-pin fish saving game. The puzzles never really rise to the challenge posed by the better “Save the Fish: The Real Game” levels. You need to watch a base number of ads no matter what you do; you can optionally watch more ads to earn currency to unlock new fish costumes.

Pull Pin promises boss fights of increased challenge, but in most of them, I didn’t even have to drop a rock on them or drown them in lava.

In the puzzle shown, if you thought that you could just draw the pin above the fish and then the pin below the water and save the fish without dealing with everything else, you would be right. Most of the puzzles are just that easy. I guess there’s a chance that killing the octopus would give greater rewards, but why would I want to kill the octopus? Seems cruel when the whole purpose of the game is to save fish. It’s right in the name.

Save the Fish – Physics Puzzle by Nirav Tank

This is not a pull pin save the fish puzzle, but it does have a cool mechanic to it. You actually scribble a line across the play field and then the line becomes a physical object which falls naturally as water runs, assuming you can see the line behind your finger as you’re drawing it.

The physics simulation is really bizarre. I drew lines twenty times to solve the puzzle before I paid their hundred coins for a hint. And even knowing what to do, I still couldn’t make the game work like it wanted. Very fiddly, very frustrating, not a pull pin puzzle, no fish were saved, would not recommend.

Save the Fish 3D by Babil Studios

I’m not sure what the third dimension used in this game is. It certainly isn’t sound — this is the first game of the ones I’ve tried that is silent. The phone does vibrate slightly while the water is draining.

Like “Pull Pin”, the solutions to these puzzles (as far as I’ve gotten in the game are obvious. Can you just choose not to release the pins that drop the bombs? Why, yes, you can just choose not to do that, and easily win.

After every two puzzles, you get a free ad. Other than that, I haven’t seen any other ways to spend money. Clearing a puzzle rewards stars and coins, but I don’t see anything at all to do with them.

After level 10, it looks like the puzzles repeat.

Help the Rubber Ducky Fish by Virtua Technologies

This is not a pull pin game. In this one, you drag a hose around the screen in order to fill tubs to send a rubber fish toy (that they call a rubber duck, which is probably what it really was before they decided to join the Save the Fish craze). You’re scored on the amount of water you used.

Level 11 was a tough level, so the puzzles do increase in difficulty. It took me several tries to figure it out. And it was so, so adorable when the fish started quacking on the way to the bathtub, a place where fishes enjoy being.

(I have to apologize. As I was adding the picture for this game, I noticed that what I thought was a bathtub was actually a bathtub-shaped aquarium. My mistake.)

Save the Fish!(tm) by Leslie Chen

First of all — she trademarked “Save the Fish!”? A quick search in the USPTO database reveals that she didn’t, at least, not in the United States. So, with that little bit of fraud out of the way, let’s try the game.

This game is the game that Nirav Tank was trying to be — a puzzle where you draw lines to save the fish. This game is both better executed and looks worlds better. The music is kind of nice. Unfortunately, few of the puzzles pose any sort of challenge, and many of them can be easily solved just by drawing a circle around the fish. It wasn’t until level 15 that I found one that I needed to think about.

It’s a cute game, and there are no ads or monetization that I saw while testing the game.

Pond – Save the Little Carp by 益苏 (Yisu)

The game opens with “O Danny Boy” played on a harp, not the kind of Chinese music I was expecting from a game that advertises itself as a “Chinese painting style game that will burn your brain!”

Pond is a sliding block game, the object of which is to get your carp block out the east exit in a straight line by moving it and the other blocks to clear the way. Most puzzles can be solved in less than ten seconds; I believe the longest it took to solve a puzzle was 21 seconds, and I had to move a lot of blocks to do it. Maybe all the sliding block puzzles in the Nonary Games prepared me for it.

The initial puzzles were timed. After an unskippable ad that eventually crashed the game, I returned and the game offered a new mode, where I was challenged to solve the puzzle in a certain number of moves.

These puzzles got pretty hard, and I spent a good fifteen minutes on one of them. I spent so much time that that Chinese harp cover of “Danny Boy” really started to get on my nerves. I had a brainstorm on one puzzle and was moving to the solution when I ran out of moves and had to watch an ad to get more. I watched that ad.

Perfect score: 18 moves. My moves: 30. Okay. I will admit that it’s an excellent puzzle game. It is not a pull pin, save the fish game.

Save Fish! by Alessio La Marca

Um, I dunno. I couldn’t figure out what to do. The opening screen — level 1 — are three corks that can rotate in 3D space around a sphere with a fish swimming in it. Water spouts from holes beneath the corks.

That’s it. I can’t plug the holes or do anything besides spin the corks (and the holes). Pressing on the fish doesn’t do anything. Not sure how it made it into the app store. It seems like something that someone tossed together to try out 3D objects and particle streams.

I don’t know if I can even rate this.

Save My Fish! – Physics Puzzle by Vipul Nathani

I’m not sure if the developer planned to write a “Save the Fish” puzzle game, especially when I am instructed to throw a burning man into some water.

Save My Fish! is essentially an homage to the “Cut the Rope!” series of physics puzzle games, where cutting a rope — or in this case, tapping red stuff to remove itself — causes various chain reactions that eventually save the fish. I am only showing this first level because I got a kick out of the instructions; later levels have a lot more going on, but the first dozen or so weren’t that awful to figure out. The game lets you watch ads to skip levels, but I wasn’t forced to watch an ad against my will in the time I played.

SaveFish 3D by Vamsi Penmetsa

Also not a pull pin puzzle. In SaveFish 3D, you control a little whirlpool that you use to gather up gunk from the water without also sweeping up eel-like fish that are either floating happily in one place or trying to get swept up in your whirlpool in flagrant disregard for their own safety or your desire to finish the level. Like a lot of similar games, this would be a lot easier if you could somehow use x-ray vision to see through your finger.

Later levels introduce larger fish, which don’t move at all, and nearly invisible fish that also don’t move, making it tough in some cases to distinguish between the stuff you’re supposed to sweep up and the fish that you’re not.

The first dozen or so levels were just being patient as I swept my finger across the screen. I didn’t see any ads while playing the game. There was also no music or other sounds to be heard. The graphics were colorful and nicely arranged. Sometimes a little toy boat sails across the screen.

And now the winners!

• Best Pull Pin Save the Fish Game — Save the Fish the Real Game by Mesiba Games. The puzzles ramp up nicely and eventually get pretty challenging. If the insane number of ads you have to watch doesn’t drive you away, you will have a good time saving fish, with a lot of options for new skins. Runner Up — Fishdom by Playrix. Their pull pin game is the best of them all. Unfortunately, the game is primarily a match-3 game.
• Best Puzzle Game — Pond — Save the Little Carp by Yisu. The puzzles are clever, the graphics are beautiful, the monetization is not obnoxious, and if it weren’t for the “O Danny Boy” loop, would be just about perfect. Runner Up: Save the Fish!(tm) by Leslie Chen. A fun little game marred by insufficient challenge — drawing a circle shouldn’t win half the games.
• Best Fish Game for your Cat — SaveFish 3D by Vamsi Penmetsa. Something tells me, if it were a little larger, cats would go wild over this game.