Every Fish Escape level has a solution — we don't ship one that doesn't. So "stuck" always means one of two things: you've made a move that closed the solution off, or you haven't found the first move yet. This guide gives you a routine for both. It is the same routine the level-checker uses, just done by eye instead of by computer.
Before you think about the next move, check whether there is one. A board is dead when no fish has a clear lane to any wall. Go around the tank once and, for each fish, trace its lane. If every single lane is blocked by a rock, seaweed or another fish, the board is deadlocked and no amount of staring will help — the move that killed it has already been made. The game shows a message when it detects this, but you can usually see it a move earlier than the game can.
If the board is dead: press Undo until a fish becomes free again, and treat the move you undid as banned. If you're more than three or four moves in, Restart is faster than undoing one tap at a time, and restarting costs nothing — hearts and hints reset with the level.
In most hard tanks one fish is the "key": every other fish either needs the cells it occupies, or needs the lane it will lay its wake in. The key fish is usually long, usually in the middle, and usually blocked. The puzzle is almost always "what sequence frees the key fish without wrecking the board for everyone else?"
To find it, look for the fish with the most other fish pointing at it. If three fish would be free the moment one particular fish left, that is your key. Then work backwards: what is blocking the key? What is blocking that? Follow the chain until you reach a fish that is free right now. That fish — not the obvious free one at the edge — is your real first move.
Pick the fish you think will be hardest to free — often the key fish, sometimes a fish boxed in a corner behind a rock. Decide which lane it will use to leave. Now you have a rule for the whole rest of the level: never lay seaweed in that lane. Every other move has to be checked against that one rule. It sounds restrictive, and that's the point; it prunes the dozens of possible orders down to the two or three that can actually work.
Then do the same for the second-hardest fish. Two protected lanes is usually enough to make the remaining moves fall into place. If protecting both lanes leaves no legal first move, one of your "hardest fish" choices is wrong — that fish must have a different exit you haven't considered, often through a lane that opens only after a short fish moves.
A hint highlights the next fish in a known solution from the board's current state. It's cheap on your first few, and from level 11 onwards you can watch a short ad to earn one. Hints are most useful at one particular moment: when you've done Steps 1–3, you've narrowed it to two candidate first moves, and you can't decide. Taking the hint then teaches you something — you'll see which of your two reasonings was right. Taking a hint while the board is still a blur teaches you nothing; you'll just tap where it says and be equally lost on the next tank.
One more thing the hint tells you implicitly: if the hint button says no hint is available, the board is already dead. That's your cue to undo, not to try harder.
The expensive mistakes in Fish Escape aren't the blocked taps that cost a heart; they're the legal taps that quietly make the level unwinnable. You can catch most of them with a single question before each move: "after this fish leaves and lays its wake, is there any fish on the board that now has no possible lane at all — not now, not after anything else moves?" If a fish is walled in on all four sides by rocks and seaweed, it is lost, and so is the level. Undo is free; a lost level isn't.
The later levels are designed around exactly this trap. They offer you a satisfying-looking opening — three free fish, all with safe-looking wakes — and one of the three permanently seals a corner. Spotting which one is the whole level.
Restart when any of these is true: you've spent two hearts and have no safe move; you're more than five moves in and the board looks nothing like your plan; or you've undone the same move twice. A fresh board with a plan beats a half-finished board with a hope. Progress is never lost — the game saves the highest level you've reached, not the state of the current attempt — so restarting the level you're on costs exactly nothing except the minute you spend on it.
And if a particular level has beaten you ten times, tell us which one. The contact page goes straight to the person who made it, and a level that stops many players is a level we look at again.
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