Explore a world where flooding has taken the sea level above, well, everything. In The Things We Lost In The Flood you play as a little person with their own rowboat. A boat you'll paddle from one nearly empty scene to another, with minimalist but wonderfully fluid pixel art evoking the misty nothingness of this post-apocalypse.
Where are you going? What are you trying to achieve? The Things' purpose lies in those bottles, which let you write your own messages for other players to discover. As you row, row your boat you'll find other players' bottles too, which you can choose to chuck back into the water, or permanently destroy once read.
I didn't come across many of them, and I can't help but write something silly whenever a game asks this of me, but I enjoyed the atmospheric pixel art, and the pitch-perfect sound effects in this bleak yet serene game.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.