ABYSS — The Last Night of the Titania

The deck is going over. You are still on it.

The Titania struck something in the dark four hundred nautical miles from anywhere, and she is going down by the head in a Drake Passage gale. There are seven hundred people on the boat deck and no boats left on your side of her.

ABYSS is a first-person survival horror in three acts.

ACT I — THE SHIP. You wake in cabin 47 with the deck already off level. Get out, climb aft through a flooding passage, and cross a hundred metres of open boat deck to the stern while she goes over underneath you. The list is not a number in the corner of the screen — it is a force. Stand still on a deck at fifteen degrees and you will drift. At twenty-five you cannot climb it at all. The crowd does not part for you; it shoves, and if you are shoved while your footing is gone, you go down and slide until you can grab something. And you are not alone down there: the ones the sea already took are standing back up.

ACT II — THE WATER. Two degrees centigrade, in your clothes, in a seaway. There is a wooden panel fifteen metres away and it is drifting. Swim to it, climb on, hold on when the seas come. Around you are a hundred and thirty people doing the same thing, and in the time she has left you will hear most of them stop. Then a man hauls himself up onto the edge of your panel, right in front of you. You can put a boot in his face, or you can do nothing and let him aboard — and the panel settles until it is barely out of the water, and there are two of you on it.

ACT III — THE DIVE. The sea does not finish with you at the surface. A push-your-luck descent roguelite: your air is the clock, the loot is deeper than you should go, and everything you have not banked is lost when the light goes.

IT IS FREE — ALL OF IT. The whole game, all three acts, plays right here in your browser, on your phone, or on Windows. No demo, no paywall.

NEW IN 1.7 — THE DROWNED

The people the sea already took are standing back up. The mission is the same — get out, get aft, take the panel, survive the water — but now something is in the way.

Cabin 47. Something stands in the corner while you wake. Somebody knocks on your door, slowly, three times. Turn around.

The corridor. Half the lamps are blown and the rest will not stop flickering. When the lights go out there are faces in the dark ahead of you — and one of them comes out of a cabin door behind you, and runs.

The boat deck. They stand on the rail, perfectly still in all of it, watching you come. They climb up out of the sea behind you, and they take hold.

The water. A face surfaces right beside you. The man who wants your panel is there in front of you now. And when her lights go out, they rise all around you.

A new score — a music box running down, a heartbeat below decks, a chase, a drowned choir — and twenty new sounds, from footsteps on wet planks to something whispering just behind you. Music and effects volume are now separate settings in the pause menu.

NEW IN 1.6

Keepsakes. The Titania's things sink with you, and you take one at every depth: a Brass Pocket Watch that stretches every air pocket, a Cork Lifejacket that halves the air it takes to get home, a Ship's Bell that doubles your depth bonus, and a Black Pearl that doubles your loot and the price of every bite. Eighteen of them, so no two dives play the same.

Chains and nerve. Grab loot back to back to build a multiplier, and bank with seconds of air left for a nerve bonus.

Daily orders with streaks, 28 achievements, a Records screen, and share cards for your deepest dive and your closest escape.

A headlamp that cuts the dark, loot that glows, and the value of every pickup rising off it.

Fixes: the pause button works on phones again.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN IT

Three acts, about forty minutes for a first run, and a dive roguelite you can keep playing after.

A ship generated entirely from numbers — a lofted, riveted hull, four raked funnels, six hundred railing parts, four hundred and fifty portholes.

Six summed Gerstner waves evaluated identically on the GPU and the CPU, so the ship, the wreckage and the people all float on exactly the water you can see.

Several hundred people on deck who steer, panic, keep families together, lose their footing as she goes over, and go over the side.

Crowd voices you can pick individual people out of — officers giving orders, families shouting for each other, children.

No image assets. Every texture in the game is generated from code when it loads.

CONTROLS — WASD to move, mouse to look, SHIFT to run, SPACE to hold on, F to shove, E to interact, ESC to pause, F11 fullscreen. Fully playable on a phone in landscape with two thumbs.

ACCESSIBILITY — camera shake down to zero, look sensitivity, a graphics quality setting and separate music and effects volume are all in the pause menu. The game also reduces detail on its own if your machine cannot hold the frame rate.

RMS Titania is fictional, and so is everyone aboard her. This is not a depiction of any real vessel, voyage, or person, living or dead. It borrows the shape of an era, not its casualty lists.

A Fliinch game. Follow fliinch.itch.io for what comes next.