Escape the Flood!

The water is already at your ankles.

You wash ashore on an island that is going under. The ocean climbs, steadily and without pause, and it does not wait for you to be ready. The beach goes first. Then everything above it, one stretch of ground at a time, until only the peak is left.

You have about thirty minutes. Take what the island gives you, build something that floats, and be on it when the ground runs out.

An island that shrinks while you work

Every island is generated fresh, and nothing you need is in one place. The hull wants wood and stone. The sail wants fiber. The rigging wants what washes up on the shore and what grows in the open grass. So you climb, you cross, you come back down for the thing you forgot, and the tideline eats the ground behind you while you do it.

Chop, mine and haul raw resources. Craft them into a hull, a sail, a paddle and rope rigging, then into the boat itself. Drop the boat at the waterline and it is yours to board.

Survive the water

• Drowning is real. Health and oxygen drain while you are under. Stay down too long and the island finishes what the flood started.

• Nobody dies instantly. Go down and you get ninety seconds of bleeding out on the ground before it becomes permanent.

• Shrines bring back the dead. Fall past that timer and you become a ghost, revivable only at a shrine, and a shrine under the waterline is a shrine nobody can reach.

• A new island every time. Procedural terrain and resource placement, so there is no route to memorize.

• Thirty minutes a round. Long enough to lose everything, short enough to immediately try again.

Alone, or with company

Play it solo as a race against the clock, where every log you carry and every minute you waste is entirely your own doing.

Or bring up to three other players. Revive each other, split the island between you, and cover ground no single survivor could. The first person to board the finished boat becomes captain, and the captain decides when to set sail. Wait, and everyone escapes together. Push off early, and the rest of them watch the shoreline shrink and read "You Were Left Behind."

Fists, axe, pickaxe and spear all swing at whatever is in front of you, and other players are not excluded from that. Proximity voice chat means you hear the people near you and lose them as they walk away, which is useful right up until it is the last thing you hear.

There is one boat and a finite amount of island.

Everything else is up to you.