Abyssa

Press

Everything on this page is generated from the app itself

Name
Abyssa
Pitch
A jigsaw atlas of the sea.
Developer
Rawezh Hama, working alone
Price
Free to start · 5,99 € a sea · 15,99 € for all three · one-time
Availability
TODO — release date not yet set
Platforms
iPhone and iPad · iOS 18 or later
Languages
English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Türkçe

Descriptions

Three lengths. Copy whichever fits.

25 words (25 exactly)

Abyssa is a quiet jigsaw atlas of the sea. Assemble antique-style natural history plates, then read the one question about each animal nobody has answered.

60 words (58 exactly)

Abyssa is a quiet game about the deep for iPhone and iPad. You descend through four seas, assembling antique-style natural history plates piece by piece. Each finished plate opens three short texts: what it is like to meet the animal, what is known about it, and one honest open question. No timer, no score, no way to fail.

150 words (158 exactly)

Abyssa is a quiet game about the deep for iPhone and iPad. You descend through four seas — the North Atlantic, the Coral Triangle, the Southern Ocean and the Trenches — assembling antique-style natural history plates piece by piece, and the paper darkens as you go, from a warm ivory at the surface to near-black four kilometres down. A plate can be cut as an ordinary jigsaw, from 24 pieces to 500, or as a disc of rings that turn until each finds its place; the sizes are offered as lengths of time rather than as difficulty. There is a second way to play, in which the puzzle is the caption rather than the picture. Finishing a plate sends it to print and opens three short texts: what it is like to meet the animal, what is known, and one open question nobody has answered. There is no timer, no score, no streak and no way to fail.

On the illustrations

The illustrations in Abyssa are AI-assisted works, made for this game in the spirit of nineteenth-century natural history plates. They are not reproductions of historical artefacts, and they are not scans or copies of any existing work.

Key facts

Why this exists

I started with the conger eel. I had read that nobody has ever seen one spawn — that the place it happens is known only from where the smallest larvae turn up and which way they drift afterwards — and I could not stop thinking about it. An animal common enough to be caught from a pier, and its most important act has never once been witnessed.

That is not a gap in a textbook. It is the interesting part, and it almost never survives into the places most people meet these animals: the label on an aquarium tank, the caption under a photograph. So I built something where it is the reward. You put a plate together slowly, and what you get is not points — it is the encounter, then what is known, then the thing that is still open. Fifty-nine times.

The rest followed from that. No timer, because nothing about this should be hurried. No score, because there is nothing to be better than. And nothing that dresses an animal up as endangered or amazing: the honest version is strange enough.

Assets

Direct links, no form, no email needed.

Download everything · 27 MB

Contact

TODO — a contact address. Apple checks this page before the app can be submitted, and a support page with no way to reach anybody is not one. Set SUPPORT_EMAIL in build/pages.py and in AppInfo.swift, then run the build again.

Promo codes for review are available on request — say which storefront and how many you need.