By day the sea sleeps, and has slept a long age. A village of trees grew out of its dreaming — an elder rising tallest among them — and in the hollow of each, a small lamplit home. No one remembers who lit the lamps, or who first moored the boats. They were always lit; the village was always here.
Now and then one of the steam-ships eases out of the haze — copper and brass, unhurried, no two of them built quite alike — and rests a while beside the village before sailing back into the distance. It lets its bundles down to the water as it idles: parcels wrapped against the spray, which splash, bob up, and drift slowly in to gather in the middle of the village. They bump together there, riding the swell, waiting. No one comes to collect them. And no ship ever comes the same way twice.
Take a boat, if you like, and pull away from the lamps — the mist closes behind you and the sea turns deep and quiet. Far out in that hush lie the old ships, half-sunk: galleons that came seeking Hollowmere and were never let leave. On a lonely island among them, four souls washed ashore and waited for a rescue that never came; they are bones now, slumped together on the sand. Reach any of them and you can read what was left written. But the deep is not empty. The thing that drowned them all still keeps the dark — now and then it slides, vast and slow, beneath your little boat; and sometimes, out in open water, its arms tear up all around you, a ring of them closing over the hull and holding you fast in a churn of spray before they drag back under. Best not linger where the water turns black.
When the light leaves the sky, the sea's dreams begin to surface: they rise as embers off the trees, every lost star comes home to the water, and pale fish drift just beneath the surface. Stay a while — the day will turn again.
Drag to look around · pinch or scroll to drift closer · tap the water (or press L) to turn day to night · double-tap for a fresh view. Right-click — or press and hold — to send a breath of light shivering through the village. Press Replay to ride the opening again.
On a desktop, click one of the moored boats to take its helm. WASD or the arrow keys steer; hold Shift to surge ahead; drag to look about you; scroll to pull right back for a sweeping aerial view. A weathered map unfurls — the lost ships marked upon it, and a quieter spot besides — far out in the deep. Sail out to read their logs, and keep your wits in open water: that is where the deep comes looking for you. Step ashore whenever you like.
Built from scratch in Three.js / WebGL. Six real-time PBR tree-homes rest on a planar-mirror ocean beneath a hand-tuned post chain — volumetric god-rays, an Orton glow, a split-tone grade, tilt-shift depth and bloom. Each home sheds its own wind-borne leaves and answers your touch with a bloom of drifting motes.
A scored cinematic opening gives way to a living world that breathes from day to dusk: drifting fireflies, a low field of stars, schools of bioluminescent fish that shoal by their own simple rules — and steam airships whose every visit is generated fresh, gliding in from beyond the haze on flight paths no one has seen before and no one will see again. The parcels they let fall splash, plunge and float for real: each rides the same simulated swell as the boats, settles to its own waterline, and bumps — never overlaps — as the unclaimed deliveries gather.
Take the helm of a boat and it answers like one — riding that same swell, throwing a real diverging wake that widens and fades astern, shouldering the drifting parcels aside (or scooping one aboard, if you're lucky), and sliding off the islands and wrecks rather than through them. Sail far enough and the half-sunk galleons and the lost island fade up out of the haze as you near them, costing the machine no thought until you go looking. The leviathan below is drawn into the water's own mirror — never a solid thing above the surface, only its reflection, a vast blur gliding under the hull. Its arms, though, are real: out in open water they erupt from the sea as lit, writhing limbs that erupt in a ring around you, seize the boat and hold it fast amid the spray before dragging back under.
The music is synthesised live, note by note. Nothing here is filmed — every frame is drawn, in your browser, right now.