Slow Water

Slow Water is a place rather than a puzzle. It is a patch of shallow water with a shoal of fish 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 is one thing to do. Move the ring to somewhere in the water and drop a little food there. The shoal will come and take it.

What happens next is the interesting part, and you never do it yourself. Where the shoal spends its time, coral slowly takes hold on the floor below them — one small block at a time. So you do not build the reef. You decide where the fish want to be, and the reef is the record of where they were.

Two things follow from that, and both of them take a while to notice:

• The water remembers. Every time you feed the fish somewhere, that part of the water stays interesting to them. When there is no food about, the shoal drifts back to the places you have fed before — including the next time you open the page, because the reef and the shoal's habits are kept on your own device.
• A tall reef has to be a wide one first. A block of coral will only settle on top of another if the blocks either side of it have caught up. So you cannot make a tower by pressing in one spot; you have to feed a whole stretch of water, patiently, and let it rise together.

It works with a mouse, with a finger, or entirely from the keyboard: the arrow keys move the ring and the space bar drops the food. Hold shift with an arrow to move further. 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.