Fog Keeper

The game

You are the last keeper on a teal-black headland at gloaming: one lamp, one cone of warm light, three ships standing out in the fog off the port. Drag to swing the beam — the light is the only thing the convoy answers, and the only thing the kraken is hunting. Lit ships pick up rim-light, deck lanterns and a warm pip on the HUD; leave one in the dark too long and the night closes over it and the shoals take it. Keep burning and the LAMP HEAT gauge fills, and when it is hot enough something rises out past the shipping lane to come for the light.

Painted in a Hopper gloaming — silhouetted headland, lone warm window, drifting teal banks and oil-painting grain over the whole frame. The clip on this page is a scripted watch: the beam walked across all three hulls, the lamp doused and relit, and the kraken driven back three times before it ever got a tentacle on the port.

How to play

• Drag anywhere on the sea to swing the lamp — the beam turns to the bearing you point at (Arrow Left / Arrow Right nudge it a step at a time).
• Click, or press Space, to kill the lamp; do it again to relight it. Dark water cools the LAMP HEAT gauge, but nothing can see you either.
• Hold the cone on a ship to keep it lit: its hull catches a warm rim, the deck lanterns come up, and its pip in the top-right glows. A ship left dark long enough is wrecked on the shoals.
• Heat climbs while the light burns. At high heat the kraken surfaces and hunts the beam's eye — put the cone on it and hold it there and it is driven back, taking five points of heat down with it.
• Top-left: HEAT bar and the LIT/DARK lamp bar. Top-centre: ships docked out of 3. Top-right: one pip per ship — warm when the beam has found it, ember-red when the dark is closing in.
• P or Escape pauses; click or press Space on the title card to take the watch.