- Pace27.8 · rather contemplative
- No clock while you build: you lay the sand at your own pace, and the tide only rises when you say so. Then it climbs slowly, square by square, and you watch it come.
- Difficulty57.4 · in between
- Each tide allows a few drowned houses, and the first crack is forgiven. Lose too many and the tide replays from its start, your dikes as they were, with a bucket more.
- Tone66.8 · rather unsettling
- An evacuated village, a radio that gets stranger with each bulletin, a moon that grows tide after tide; but lit windows answer every tide held, and dawn comes back.
- Story41.6 · in between
- No narrator: one line of radio per tide, the hour on the clock, and the moon growing in the sky tell the night.
- Scale68.6 · rather cosmic
- A handful of squares of sand under your finger, and above them a second moon that pulls the whole sea: the village gets bigger, and so does the moon.
- Form49.7 · in between
- A known idea, building dikes against water, made strange by a moon you can see tilting the sea; everything shows: the dotted line, the leaning level, the cracks.
- Look36.2 · in between
- Clean and sparse: black sand, jade water, white houses, a lilac sky, and the only details are foam, lit windows, and the moon.
The theme
One October night, a second moon nobody had seen draws close to the Earth, and each tide climbs higher than the last. On a coast of black sand, you keep an evacuated village dry, from the mudflats to perigee, when the sea rears up in a column toward the moon. At dawn the moon pulls away, the clocks go back an hour, and the dikes you traced in the night stay drawn on the sand.
The mechanics
Between tides, you raise the sand square by square (tap, drag, or arrows and Space) with a set number of buckets; a dotted line shows how far the water will reach, and the moon tilts it toward its side. Then you let it rise: the water seeps in square by square, and you patch any square that cracks red by tapping it. If too many houses drown, death shows where the water got through, and the tide replays from its start, dikes included, with one more bucket.
Palette
Lilac sky #d9d3e6 turning to sunset then night #141826, jade sea #4f8f86 edged with foam #eef3ee, black volcanic sand #2b2a2e and pale laid sand #c9bfae, white houses #f2efe6 with yellow windows #f5c84c, coral warnings #e8604c, a moon #f2efe6 ringed with rust #b5653a. Unbounded for titles, Azeret Mono for the radio and the numbers. Calm, clean, with a worry that rises with the water.
