Splash: Underwater Sanctuary will use Carmen Sandiego tactics to teach you about fish

Kids learn better if the information they are absorbing could later incriminate someone.

At least, that was one of the chief takeaways from Broderbund’s series of educational Carmen Sandiego adventure games. Players underwent missions to find the next clue to the identity or location of one of Carmen’s henchmen embedded in the historical facts about a region or time period included in the in-game encyclopedia index. By spelunking through an introductory guide to the history of Chile, young gamers memorized test-worthy data while fulfilling their espionage fantasies. Runaway and DeNA’s mobile simulation game Splash: Underwater Sanctuary wants to engage players in a similar way but with fish.

Splash is primarily a game about breeding and re-populating various fish and aqueous species, each with distinctive behaviors. The New Zealand studio’s previous effort, Flutter, had a similar aim with the rainforest species of butterflies. Tapping on a fish feeds it and grants you eggs to hatch more underwater creatures. Repeat the process until your virtual aquarium is at acceptable levels of cuteness. Successfully taking care of a species through its life-cycle — which Runaway reportedly based on real data — lets you release the population into the greater wild beyond your interactive coral reef starting space.

When players want to maximize their rewards, Splash begins taking notes from Lady Sandiego’s stolen handbook. After the player completes the game’s tutorial, a character will eventually appear in their coral reef with possible missions to undertake for larger rewards. In order to fully understand these missions, players must reference their Aquapedia, an in-game collection of species and conservation facts as well as game progress data.

Players just need to flip through said Aquapedia and find a particular nugget of information in order to plug in the data and figure out the exact mission requirement. For example, in order to get a new species of seahorse, players will have to successfully breed a certain number of a fish species with a certain life span. If you find out that Angelfish tend to live exactly as long as the mission prompt hints at, just get enough adults of that species out into the greater ocean, and you’ll find some seahorse eggs nested among your coral.

Education and entertainment rarely blend. But when it does, people tend to take notice. The Carmen Sandiego games nearly perfected a kind of “learning by accident,” baiting players with thieves to catch and points to earn by setting up gameplay barriers that required a simple key phrase or factoid to move beyond. Runaway is buffering its animal husbandry simulation in the same way, granting the biggest rewards to players willing to research about jellyfish mating habits. Whether that works as well as letting players track down a middle-aged woman that somehow stole the entire Statue of Liberty remains to be seen.