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Dead Water In development
A go-fast boat running at speed at dawn, cargo lashed to the bow, low islands on the horizon.

deckhand@dead-water:~$ running_dark

Dead Water

The water is the wild west with satellites.

A smuggling game on today's shipping lanes. Load a boat, run cargo past a surveillance state watching from orbit, and turn what you stole into money that will not get you arrested.

Get the demo How it plays

Persistent world First person No release date

The run

Nothing you are carrying is worth anything yet.

Cargo on the deck is a liability until it is cash, and cash is a liability until it is clean. The game is about conversion, not accumulation. Every step of the way down that chain is somewhere you can get caught.

  1. 01

    Load

    Buy the cargo up front. You are invested before you cast off.

  2. 02

    Run

    Open water is fast and exposed. The shoreline is slow and covered. Pick one.

  3. 03

    Score

    Engine off at the drop. The most vulnerable minute of the night.

  4. 04

    Convert

    Cargo to cash, cash to clean. Every step takes a cut and leaves a trace.

  5. 05

    Spend

    Boats, crew, bribes, vice. Then go out again, because you are broke again.

The boats

Your boat is your loadout.

A go-fast outruns anything and explains nothing. A trawler is slow, scannable and completely believable. A yacht opens doors a working boat never will. None of them is the best one. They are all a different argument about what you are willing to risk.

Bigger hulls need more hands at once. Crew size is the difficulty dial, not a stat you buy.

See the roster
Silhouette study of six hull types: a go-fast, a fishing trawler, a rigid inflatable, a motor yacht, a semi-submersible and a cargo freighter.
A small boat running dark at night under a searchlight from a pursuing patrol.

Going dark

Identity is equipment.

There is no star meter. What follows you is an evidence picture: transponder history, satellite passes, a witness in a port, shell casings, and eventually your own bank records. Different evidence clears in different ways, and some of it never clears at all.

You can run with your transponder on and be legible but legitimate, or run dark and be invisible to tracking and deeply suspicious to anything that sees you. Or you can wear somebody else's name. A trawler that is really tied up three ports away is a very good thing to be.

Two boats meeting in a mangrove cove at night to transfer cargo.

The crew

A bigger boat needs more trust than firepower.

One hull, and more jobs than one person has hands for. Somebody has the wheel. Somebody is watching the radar and deciding whether the contact closing from the north is a fishing boat. Somebody is on deck with the cargo when the engine goes quiet. The bigger the boat, the more of those jobs exist at once.

You can do all of it alone. It is meant to feel like doing three jobs badly. Everyone else is out there on the same water at the same time, running their own cargo, and some of them would rather take yours than earn it.

No storefront, no wishlist button

Get the demo when it drops

One email when the free demo is playable. One more when the game is out. That is the whole plan, and you can leave any time.

We will not sell your address, and this list is for the game only. No trading talk, no price talk. If we ever break that, unsubscribe and tell us why.

Where this actually is

Early. There is a design document, an economy on paper, and a prototype whose only job right now is to prove that driving a boat fast is fun. If that part is not good, none of the rest matters and we would rather find out cheaply.

The devlog is where the honest version lives, including the parts that do not work. The roadmap shows what we are trying to prove and in what order.