Portugues
Swimming With Sharks
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About the game
Somewhere near the Bermudas, a small group is spending the day on a boat. A scream comes from the cabin, and when you look, the skipper is dead. Nobody saw anything, everybody has a theory, and the boat cannot go anywhere because the keys are gone, apparently dropped in the sea, with a shark swimming right over them.
Swimming With Sharks is a short point-and-click mystery played in a handful of scenes on and around the boat. You question the passengers, who are all suspicious in their own way (one thinks it was aliens, one blames the Bermuda Triangle, one thinks the skipper just had a heart attack), look for clues, collect odd objects and work out what to do about the shark. The tone is light and deadpan, closer to a comedy sketch than to a thriller, and everything is drawn as clean, flat silhouettes against blue sky and water.
Markus Fisch made it for js13kGames 2022, where the whole game, zipped, had to fit in 13 kilobytes. The theme that year was "Death".
Playing it here
This is the build submitted to the competition, unchanged. Click Play, then click the arrows at the edge of the scene to move around the boat. The game is meant to be played with plain clicks: you do not need to drag items, and it will work out what to do with what you carry. The story involves a death and a murder investigation, told as a joke and without any graphic scenes. Nothing is saved, and a full run is short.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click an arrow | go to the next part of the boat |
| Click a person | talk to them |
| Click an object | look at it, pick it up or use it |
| Tap (touch screens) | the same as a click |
A few things worth knowing
Talk to everyone. Each passenger has their own idea of what happened, and some of them know more than they say.
Look at the little things. A scratch, a plate, a watch: small details are the clues.
Think about the shark. The way out of the story goes through the water, and one passenger knows what sharks can smell from miles away.
Credits and licence
Swimming With Sharks was written and drawn by Markus Fisch for js13kGames 2022. He released it into the public domain under the Unlicense; the licence text is linked from this page, and the source code is on GitHub.