Brinelight

A heart of light beats at the bottom of the sea. Feed it creatures and it glows brighter.

Brinelight is a calm idle game drawn in pixel art. Glowmotes, moon jellies, seahorses, anglers and stranger things really swim around your reef. When two different species drift close, a thread of light forms between them, and every thread makes the whole reef shine brighter.

• Hold the water to pull a current: the threads inside it reach further and burn twice as bright.

• Threads form and break as the creatures move, so the reef is never quite the same twice.

• Buy creatures and mutations, and catch the golden spores that drift by for a Bloom Frenzy.

• Leave it alone: it keeps gathering light while you are away.

One button hides every menu and leaves only the reef. On Windows it sinks behind your desktop icons and becomes your wallpaper: a living, animated reef under your icons that keeps gathering light while you work. No wallpaper program needed, and a tray icon brings the game back. On Mac and Linux it fills the screen instead.

When the way down opens, Descend: release your reef, keep your pearls, and sink into the next zone, where everything shines brighter for every pearl you carry.

The Twilight Reef, the Midnight Trench, the Abyssal Plain, the Hadal Gardens, the Drowned Choir and the Heart of the Deep: each zone has its own creatures and changes the rules of the web.

• Warm vents charge every thread in their plume.

• A gulper eel bites through the web until you drive it off.

• Glass sponges and sea pens anchor the web; drag them where the threads pass.

• Three creatures linked to each other form a constellation.

• The choir sings chords on the heartbeat, and keeps time with you.

• And at the bottom, the heart itself blooms.

Below the heart lie the Leviathan's dreams: zones without end that borrow the deep's rules and bend the laws of the web, with creatures in new colours, landmarks and relics to find. Replay a zone you have cleared with a twist as a dive, while your reef waits. And somewhere down there, something is waiting to wake.

The Depth Log keeps what survives every descent: the Abyssal Tree, 19 trials, 8 secrets, 9 relics, and a bestiary with rare shiny creatures to spot.

• A tutorial without text boxes: the game shows you what to do, one thing at a time. The codex (H) explains everything else.

• No ads, no accounts, no microtransactions, no data collected. Your reef is saved on your own computer.

• Fullscreen with F11 or Alt+Enter.