Deep Field

One boat. One lamp. A thousand metres of black water underneath you.

You are not fishing. You lower a lit lure down the line and wait, and when something rises out of the dark you get a few seconds to look at it — its shape, the way it swims, what it does when the light changes — and then you open your field journal and put a name to it. Get it right and the plate inks itself in and the water below you opens up. Get it wrong and the animal leaves and the page stays blank.

The lamp is the whole decision. Turn it up and you can see fins, eyes, ciliary rows — but bright light frightens the shy ones off, and it draws something else entirely. Turn it down and the timid come right up to you, and you are naming a silhouette.

How to play

S	pay the line out — go deeper
W	haul it back in
E / Q	brighten / dim the lamp (0.06 – 1.00)
J	open and close the field journal
↑ ↓	move between plates · ← → move between strata
Enter	open a plate, and record the identification
Esc	hold the dive
Space	begin, and move past a card

The screen is portrait on purpose: it is the water column. The lamp sits high in the frame, the line runs down through it, and the bottom two thirds are the dark that things come up out of.

Four strata

• The Sunlit Fringe — 0–40 m. Blue-green, caustics on the underside of the surface, animals you half recognise.
• The Twilight Reach — 40–120 m. Colour drains out. Silver, and things that light themselves from below.
• The Midnight Water — 120–400 m. Black. Bioluminescence is the only colour left.
• The Trench — 400–1000 m. Almost nothing — and then the specimen that has no plate in the book at all.

Strata open on identifications, not on time. Thirteen animals; twelve of them are in the journal already, drawn and described, waiting to be matched.

What to look at

The field journal is the other half of the game — a real notebook, in copperplate and serif, with tabbed reaches, a hand-lettered depth index, ink plates that fill in as you name things, and three field notes per animal written so you can actually check them against what is in front of you.

And the last page of Reach IV, which reads Unrecorded · Species non descripta, and which you have to draw yourself.