Swimming with Sharks

Play:

Maximise Touch: Tap a character or object to investigate it; tap the (faint) directional arrows to move between rooms. Confirmed working, including a unique response from tapping a specific character. · Keyboard: Not required; entirely tap/click-driven.

About:

Built for js13k 2022: a guest has died on a pleasure cruise and you investigate suspects, rooms and objects to work out what happened, played for dark comedy rather than dread. js13kgames.com's own judged results are genuinely strong: 10th of the field for gameplay, 17th for controls, 20th for graphics.

Touch was confirmed as real investigation rather than a slideshow: tapping a specific character's exact hitbox produced a unique response distinct from the scripted intro dialogue, reproduced with a mouse click on desktop. One real, verifiable flaw: the directional arrows used to move between rooms are genuinely low-contrast against the sky-blue background, confirmed both by this review's own screenshots and by a competition judge who got stuck badly enough to force progress via the browser console.

Credits:

Made by Markus Fisch, 2022. Published here under the Unlicense licence. Source code. The author's own page for it.

Phone check: played on a simulated phone (390x844, real touch) and on desktop (mouse) on 7 Sep 2026 — tapping a specific character produced a unique response, confirming genuine point-and-click investigation; zero console errors, zero failed requests

Tags:

js13k · adventure · point-and-click · murder mystery · browser game · free · public domain