Water Bear
Twenty Waves in a Drop of Pond Water
A tardigrade - a water bear, half a millimeter long - on a microscope slide, and everything else that lives in wet moss swimming at it: slipper-shaped paramecia, red water mites, worms that lunge in a straight line, hydras that sting from a distance, amoebas that split in two when popped. You only move. Up to six weapons from the lab bench float around you and aim and fire by themselves, and every wave runs on a clock that gets longer - twenty seconds at first, ninety for the last, when something very large arrives. Between waves you spend the algae the creatures drop in a shop of four offers, and choose a stat for every level you gained.
Why Nothing Here Coasts
At the size of a tardigrade, water behaves less like water and more like honey. What decides it is one ratio, the one Osborne Reynolds showed in 1883 to settle how a fluid flows: how big and how fast a thing is, against how thick the fluid it moves through is. A person swimming sits at around a million on that scale and glides after every stroke. Something a few tenths of a millimeter long, moving at its own pace, sits near one or below it, and at that size stopping is instant: the moment it stops pushing, it stops. That is why nothing in the game has momentum. The water bear goes where you point it and stands still the moment you let go, and a hit that knocks a creature back is soaked up by the water within a tenth of a second.
How to play
- Move with WASD or the arrow keys, hold the mouse button where you want to go, or drag on a touch screen. The weapons aim themselves; your job is to stay out of reach.
- A red cross on the slide is where something will appear a second later, and anything about to lunge or land shows its path on the ground first.
- Algae is money and experience at once. Whatever is left on the slide when a wave ends goes into a bag and doubles what you pick up next wave.
- Two of the same weapon at the same tier merge into one a tier higher. Six is the most you can carry: a tardigrade has eight legs and needs two of them to run.
- Two or more weapons of one kind make a set, and its bonus grows with each one added. All six dangers are open from the start, and a win earns that hero a star.
