Slow Water

Slow Water is a place rather than a puzzle. It is a patch of shallow water with life living in it, and there is nothing in it to solve, nothing to get right, and no way to lose. You visit it, you touch it, and it answers.

There are two things you can do, and neither of them is scored.

Drop food. Move the ring to somewhere in the water and let a little food go. Something will come and take it — but which something depends on where you put it, and that is the first thing worth finding out.

• The shoal is the crowd. It swims together, it takes its time, and it is the one that draws itself into a shape.
• The darters are the quick ones near the surface. They reach a piece of food before anything else does. Food dropped high and in a hurry is food the darters get, and darters keep no shape at all.
• The grazers are slow, and they are not there at the start. They arrive once a stretch of water has been fed enough to be rich, and then they live in it. Nothing they do makes water rich — only your feeding does that.

Stir the water. Drag across the water with a finger or a mouse, hold shift with an arrow key, or press the button. The water starts drifting that way and carries the food along with it, so the food gets eaten a long way from where you dropped it. That matters because of what happens next.

Here is the interesting part, and you never do it yourself. The water remembers where the food was actually eaten — not where you aimed, where the fish got to it. And the shoal gathers into the shape of that memory:

• Feed one spot, over and over, at one depth, and the shoal draws itself into a tight ball.
• Feed along a stretch — or feed once and set a current going, so the food travels — and it strings out into a long ribbon.
• Feed at one place but at several different depths, high then low, and it stands up into a tall column.
• Feed all over, at many places and many depths, and it opens out into a wide sheet that takes up most of the water.

Nobody tells the fish to do that and there is no button for it. Each fish is only keeping its distance from the others and staying in the water it likes; the shape is what thirty of them make of the room they are given. So you are not drawing a shape. You are deciding where the fish want to be, and the shape is what that turns into.

Two more things follow, and both take a while to notice:

• The water goes rich where you keep feeding it, and you can see that: it darkens low down, and the big slow grazers come and live there. It is still there the next time you open the page, because it is kept on your own device — so you come back to a shoal already in the shape you left it in, over the water you taught it.
• Things cross the water while you watch. A jellyfish drifts in from one side and out the other. The shafts of light walk slowly across. Nothing needs doing about either of them; they are just what is going past.

It works with a mouse, with a finger, or entirely from the keyboard: the arrow keys move the ring, the space bar drops the food, and shift with an arrow sets a current going that way. There are four colourways and all four are yours from the start — nothing here has to be earned.

Nothing is timed, nothing is scored, and nothing is ever taken away.

This game needs JavaScript. With JavaScript switched off, this page is the description you are reading now, and there is no water to feed. Nothing else on the page depends on it, and nothing is lost apart from the fish.