Tidewrack

You wake up lashed to a few logs. No land. No boat. No memory of how you got here. Just water, in every direction.

Then a plank drifts past. You've got a harpoon. And from here on, the story is yours to write.

You're alone, until you're not

Gather wood. Fish. Don't die of thirst. You can do all of that by yourself, or you can bring someone in. Friends come straight out of your Steam list: you pick a name, and a moment later they're standing on your raft. No server to rent, no ports to open, no IP address to type out.

The host brings the world. Start a fresh one, or open the save you've been building on for weeks. Everyone ends up in the same ocean and sees the same thing: every plank, every storm, every shark.

Everyone carries their own backpack, so handing something over means dropping it in the raft's store for the other one to take out, the way you'd pass a crate along the deck.

The deep doesn't play by your rules

There's a whole world under your raft. Reefs. Wrecks. Fish flashing in the dark. But your air runs out before you've seen it all, and without goggles, everything blurs into murk anyway. Whatever you miss on the first dive is still waiting for you on the second.

Everything changes when the sun goes down

Boats come at night. Raiders hack through your walls while you sleep, or don't sleep, because you're standing watch instead. A shark circles your deck, patient, like it knows it just has to wait. A storm tears at everything you've built. And when your battery bank runs dry, the lights go out first, right when you need them most.

Wood burns. A fire arrow catches in your deck, your walls, your sails, and the only thing that stops it is a bucket of seawater. It works the other way round as well: hit a raider boat while it's still out on the water and it never arrives. From a watchtower you spot it early enough to try.

There's an answer, if you can find it

26 research nodes give you the tools to actually survive, not just hang on. Debris fields drift by on the horizon. Miss them, and they're gone for good. And somewhere in between, scattered across 24 message-in-a-bottle fragments, is the answer to the one question that's been nagging you since you woke up on those logs: why did the world drown in the first place?

At the end of it all, something is waiting. Bigger than your raft. Bigger than anything you've seen so far. The leviathan.