ArcadeWhale
ArcadeWhale OriginalMade in-house, playable only here
Highwater
How to play
Tap a lit tile to row · people climb in · skiff seats two — unload at the barge · tap the roof beside you to sandbag — U undo, H hint, arrows/Enter too
About Highwater
Highwater is a free turn-based rescue puzzle you play in the browser. A valley is going under. You have one flat-bottomed skiff, a handful of people standing on their roofs, and a barge tied up at the far end of the water. The twist is in the clock: there is no timer, and the flood is not on a schedule of its own. The water rises because YOU moved. Every stroke of the oars, every sandbag, every door you kick in advances the flood one step — so the question is never "can I get there in time", it is "who do I spend my turns on, and who do I leave standing there".
That makes the countdown on each roof the most important number on the screen. A house shows how many turns it has before the water closes over it, and those numbers are not decoration: they are derived from how far that roof sits from the open channels at the start, and the farthest villager always has the shortest fuse. The nearest person is almost never the right person. A player who simply rows to whoever is closest loses fifty-eight of the sixty levels — that is measured, not a figure of speech — because by the time the easy pickups are aboard, the ones out at the edge of the valley are already gone.
Five verbs arrive across the campaign and each one changes what a level even is, rather than making an old thing bigger. You row. From the tenth level you can drop a sandbag on a roof, buying that house extra turns at the cost of turns you do not have. Later you catch a mooring post with a rope and haul the skiff across open water faster than oars can carry it. Later still you break a door or a fence post that is sealing off a whole flooded street. And at the end you carry a single flare, which brings a villager who has bolted for high ground back down to the water where you can actually reach them.
The valley pushes back in ways you have to read rather than react to. Currents drag the skiff a tile with the tide, so a route that looks one move long is two. Half-sunken wreckage blocks channels until something shifts it. Villagers panic: when the water reaches them they scramble to the highest dry ground next door, which sometimes saves them and sometimes strands them somewhere you cannot row. The last chapter is a night storm — not faster on average, but spikier, with surges that jump the water two steps at once and turn a comfortable plan into a scramble.
Sixty levels across five chapters, and every one of them has been checked to be finishable: a reference pilot clears all sixty, which is the difference between a puzzle that is hard and one that is broken. Stars are awarded for finishing near the ideal number of turns, so a level you scraped through is a level worth coming back to. Three free undos and two free hints per level take the sting out of learning, and the hint is the same reference pilot that proves the level is solvable, so it never sends you somewhere useless. It is free, there is nothing to install and no account, it runs on a desktop with a mouse or arrow keys and on a phone with one thumb, and your progress is stored on your own device.
Tap or click a lit tile to row there — lit tiles are everywhere the skiff can reach this turn. Pull up alongside a roof and the person on it climbs in by themselves — but the skiff only seats two, and a heavy passenger takes both seats, so a full boat has to go back to the barge before it can pick anybody else up. The Boat counter at the top of the screen is the one that decides your route; row to the lit barge to drop them off. Tapping a roof next to you sandbags it, a mooring post pulls you in on the rope, and a door or fence post beside you gets broken open. Every one of those moves raises the water one step.
The number on a roof is the number of turns before it goes under. Because the flood only advances when you act, that number is a budget you are spending, not a countdown you are racing.
U undoes, H asks for a hint and P pauses; arrow keys and Enter move the skiff for players who prefer the keyboard.
Game details
- Developer
- ArcadeWhale
- Genre
- Puzzle
- Released
- Updated
- Platforms
- Browser (desktop, mobile, tablet)
- Orientation
- Portrait or landscape
- Players
- Single player
- Leaderboard
- Weekly, resets every Monday
Frequently asked questions
How does the water work in Highwater?
It rises when you act, not on a timer. Every move you make — rowing, sandbagging, roping, breaking something open, firing the flare — advances the flood one step, and the level tells you how many moves each step takes. That means you can sit and think for as long as you like without losing anybody, and it also means there is no such thing as a free move. In the last chapter storm surges add a second, irregular rise on top of the first, so the rhythm changes even though the average speed does not.
Why do I keep losing people even though I rescued the nearest ones first?
Because nearest-first is the trap the whole game is built around. The countdown on each roof comes from how far that house sits from open water at the start, and the farthest villager is given the shortest fuse, so the people who look safe because they are close are usually the ones with the most turns to spare. Read the numbers before you read the distances. A pilot that always goes to the closest person fails fifty-eight of the sixty levels.
What is the sandbag for, if it costs me a turn?
It buys turns for a house you cannot reach yet. Dropping a bag on a roof raises it, which pushes back the turn the water closes over it — but placing it is itself a move, so the flood climbs while you do it. It is worth it when one long trip would otherwise cost you somebody on the way back, and it is a waste when the deadline was never going to be the problem. Working out which of those you are looking at is most of the middle of the campaign.
How many people fit in the skiff?
Two — and that limit is the reason the game is a route puzzle rather than a collection run. A heavy passenger fills both seats on their own, so sometimes the boat is full with one person aboard. When it is full nobody else can climb in, and the counter at the top of the screen turns red and says so; the only way to make room is to row to the barge and drop off who you have. Planning that return trip into the route, before the water closes the channel you came in by, is most of the difficulty in the later chapters.
Can every level actually be finished?
Yes, and it is checked rather than assumed. Each level is generated and then repaired until a reference pilot can clear it, and that same pilot is what the hint button runs, so a hint always shows a move that is on a route to finishing. If you are stuck, two hints per level are free before the game offers to trade one for a rewarded ad, and undo is free three times.
Does Highwater need a download, and does it work on a phone?
No download, no account, no purchase. It runs in the browser on desktop and on mobile, and because it is turn-based it plays perfectly well with one thumb — every action in the game is a single tap on a tile, and the tile you tap decides which action it is. Keyboard players can use the arrow keys and Enter, with U for undo, H for hint and P to pause. Progress is stored locally on the device you play on.
