Full suggestions, generous mapping, lighter resource pressure, and unrestricted rewind.
Public field record · Expedition 05
The coast does not need another warning. It needs an answer.
A long-form text adventure about water, public memory, emergency authority, and the material work of keeping one another alive.
Begin the descentA living drowned city
You play a Wayfinder searching for the missing engineer Orra Vale. What begins as a local rescue becomes a coast-wide struggle over who receives shelter, passage, recovery, and a voice in the forecast.
Type what you want to do, follow visible routes, question the people you meet, and solve mechanisms through tools, discovered evidence, or relationships. The world remembers shared work, delayed promises, and the choices you carry from one community to another.
123interconnected locations
13regions and named characters
31multi-solution mechanisms
3,346scenery responses
13tailored epilogue profiles
8–12hmain expedition
Choose your field mode
Contextual guidance, discovered-location mapping, baseline pressure, and forty undo snapshots.
No suggested commands, a local map, heavier attrition, no undo, and three live route-reading puzzles.
Built to answer experimentation
Every named room feature responds deterministically to examining, reading, listening, smelling, touching, moving, and using it. Commands can be chained; pronouns such as IT and THEM retain context; and ambiguous nouns prompt a free clarification instead of consuming a turn.
The living coast carries deterministic weather, roaming characters, recoverable resource pressure, optional navigation complexes, an evidence journal, adaptive hints, maps, scoring, and a three-stage closing crisis. Completionist expeditions can descend into the eighteen-room Hidden Commons and pursue a 250-point mastery track.
Accessible, installable, local-first
The complete game can be played with text, a keyboard, and no sound. It includes transcript sizing, increased contrast, reduced motion, keyboard-managed dialogs, screen-reader announcements, and text equivalents for decorative ASCII scenes.
Install on iPhone or iPad
Open the game in Safari, tap the Share button, choose Add to Home Screen, turn on Open as Web App when shown, then tap Add.
- Open this site in Safari.
- Tap Share, or More and then Share.
- Choose Add to Home Screen, then Add.
On supported desktop and Android browsers, use the on-screen Install field journal control. After one complete online load, the cached game shell can reopen offline on the same device.
Content notes
The story includes flooding and drowning themes, dangerous storms, illness and injury, references to death and collective loss, displacement, censorship, coercive institutions, and manufactured debt. Conflict is resolved without combat, and violence is not depicted graphically. Later chapters introduce time and resource pressure, but missed work remains recoverable.
Credits and disclosure
Created and directed by Simon Jakowicz.
The Hollow Meridian was made with substantial generative-AI assistance from OpenAI Codex across game design, programming, testing, and player-facing writing. Simon Jakowicz directed the project and is responsible for the released work. The game does not call a generative-AI service during play.