A quiet deep-sea sandbox: no score, no timer, nothing chasing you. Take a submarine down into a bioluminescent trench and look at it.
The whole place is dark by default, so your headlight is the verb — the reef only exists where you point it. Pink and blue coral colonies throw their own glow onto the rock they grow from. Shafts of surface light come down through the water and lay caustics on the sand where they land. Marine snow drifts past.
Something large lives here. A leviathan the length of the basin swims a slow circuit with a row of lights down its flanks; a shark crosses in front of them, visible only as a shape. Lantern fish patrol the rim carrying real lights on their lures. Down on the floor there are hydrothermal vents, worm colonies, and two broken wooden hulls that have been there long enough to become reefs themselves.
Open it with friends and their submarines are down there with you.
Every object in it was modelled in code with @antics/modelkit and exported to glTF — no meshes were sculpted by hand.
How to play The Trench
There is nothing to win. Go and look at things.
DESKTOP
W A S D or the arrow keys — steer and drive
Space / Shift — rise and dive
Drag — look around
Scroll — zoom
PHONE
Left thumb — steer and drive
Right thumb — rise and dive
Drag the middle of the screen — look around
The submarine has mass and the water has drag, so it coasts when you let go and the helm bites harder once you have way on. Depth is its own control — you do not point the nose up to climb.
Worth finding: the two wrecks on the floor, the hydrothermal vents and their worm colonies, the pools of caustic light under each shaft, and the leviathan — it makes a full circuit of the basin, so if it is not in view, wait.
