Life's a Beach

Walk a beach as an otter. Choose your beach from twenty real ones round the planet, each with its true shoreline and its true sky: the stars and constellations as they stand over that beach, the moon as it is tonight. A day passes in twenty minutes.

Now and then there is a bottle in the sand. Open it and read what someone left. Then leave it where it lay, throw it back to sea for someone else to find, or write a message of your own and throw that. A thrown bottle drifts for real days and fetches up on a beach of the same ocean. Every fifth bottle or so holds a blank page and a pencil stub instead: write on the page, if you like. That is all there is to do.

Controls

• W A S D walk · mouse look · Shift run · R keep walking
• E open a bottle, then Q leave it, T throw it back, E write a reply · B write a message of your own
• C check the time, where you are, and when the moon and sun next rise or set
• K draw and name the constellations · G the globe: go to another beach
• V see yourself, from behind and then face to face · F The Advanced Prototype Headlamp from HALDO LABS · L change how the game is painted
• Esc free the mouse · ? all the keys

Reading is free, and so is writing on a blank page when you find one. Writing whenever you like is for walkers who have paid a dollar: sign in with itch.io inside the game and you get a satchel of thirteen bottles. A message you throw may cross the ocean, or wash back up on the beach you threw it from, for someone else to read. Each bottle you throw is replaced in your satchel five minutes later. Every message is checked before any other walker can find it.

Plays in the browser, with a keyboard and mouse.

Coastlines © OpenStreetMap contributors. Land from Natural Earth. Stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue; constellation figures from d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn. The moon's surface map is NASA's.