BENTHIC

Your probe sinks. It does not stop.

BENTHIC is an incremental game about descending an ocean trench. Depth is your progress bar. Pressure is both your fuel and the wall you're forever pushing against. The deeper you go, the stranger the dark becomes — and the worse you feel about the number going up.

Ping the dark. Spend what it gives you. Build pressure turbines and specimen sieves, plate your hull against the crushing deep, and fall — through the Twilight, the Midnight, the Abyss, the Trench, and the places the charts refuse to name.

Catalogue the impossible. Real creatures at their real depths — lanternfish, the vampire squid, the hadal snailfish smiling at 8,178 m — give way, past the floor of the world, to things that should not be there. Sonar picks them up as unidentified contacts; spend power to focus the array and learn what's been keeping pace with you in the dark.

Run dark. Cut the floodlights to slip past what your brightness attracts — and meet the nine creatures that only approach a probe that can't see them coming.

Surface & refit. When the pressure finally halts you, blow ballast, bank what you've learned, and dive again — deeper, in a probe that remembers.

Features

• A full descent through 8 ocean zones, from sunlit shallows to true black
• 48 creatures to detect and catalogue, each granting permanent bonuses — and a bestiary that quietly goes wrong below 11,000 m
• Leviathans that loom: the giants don't just blip the sonar — they cross the beam at full size and dwarf your probe
• An active sonar layer: detect, focus, identify — or run dark. Lights draw raids; the dark draws things that cling to the hull. Choose your hunters.
• A probe that remembers: “Surface & refit” prestige — and your sub visibly earns its scars, plating, and veteran alloy with every dive
• Offline progress and a save that's all yours (in your browser)
• Entirely hand-built: every visual is drawn on a canvas, every sound is synthesised live — no asset files, ~50 KB, runs anywhere
• Creeping dread that almost no idle game attempts: the deeper the number, the worse it gets

Notes

• Headphones recommended — the soundscape is half the game, and the deep has a sound.
• Saves locally and keeps descending while you're away.
• Free. Have a nice dive.

The trench provides. The trench expects.

Update history — what's changed (click to expand)

v0.6.2 — Stability & comfort

• Hardened the bottom of a very long dive — the instruments can no longer overflow into nonsense, however deep you push.
• The soundscape now rests when the tab is in the background and wakes when you return.
• Tidier controls on small screens, and friendlier to screen readers.

v0.6.1 — Polish & fixes

• The Sonar Array's contact range now genuinely reaches ahead — creatures register before you arrive at their depth, and the giants loom in as you approach (it used to be cosmetic).
• A cleaner, calmer play field — cleared the scanlines and stray scrolling lines so nothing crosses the screen but the deep itself.
• A full QA pass: balance, stability and save-integrity fixes throughout.

v0.6.0 — A longer dark

• The descent is slower and more deliberate now, so the deep lasts.
• New silhouettes prowling the water: sharks, rays, billfish and flatfish — plus more species to catalogue.

v0.5.0 — Life & goals

• Smoother, steadier descent.
• Objectives & achievements to chase.
• More creatures, and sharper creature art — the anglerfish finally carries its lure.

v0.4.x — The probe remembers

• Surfacing & refit genuinely pays off now — and your sub visibly earns its scars, plating and veteran alloy with every dive.
• Leviathans that loom: the giants cross the beam at full size.
• The dark bites back — run dark and something may cling to the hull; keep the lights on and you draw raids.
• Fixed a freeze at extreme depth.