Windows & Linux alpha v0.1.22 · Godot 4 / C#

Foundering

A survival-horror roguelite aboard a sinking ocean liner. Start deep in the flooding hull and climb toward the boats — managing cold, breath, light, and the people you meet — before the water, the pressure behind the watertight doors, and the ship itself finish you.

It is about generating the right feelings: despair, then hope; cold and alone in the wet dark, and then you find someone. The ship sinks over hours, not minutes — a deliberate climb, not a mad rush — while a clock ticks toward 2:20 AM and the water reads how far she has gone under.

Ways to play

• Voyage — the roguelite. A branching run through ten distinct sections of the ship; at every exit you choose to climb toward the surface, hold the deck and head aft, or descend deeper, while the flood persists and worsens. A cross-section between levels shows where you are.
• Endless — the same climb, without end; keep going as long as you can.
• Historical — the real ships, at their real size, at the speed it really happened. 1912: two hours and forty minutes, and a long climb. 1915: eighteen minutes, and a list so steep half the boats will not launch. 1916: a ship built to survive this, going down in fifty-five minutes because somebody left the portholes open.
• Calm Waters — the same ships, before any of it. Nothing sinks. Walk two hundred and sixty metres of liner, and talk to the people who were really aboard.
• Tutorial — learn the ropes at your own pace.

Who are you going to be?

• Steerage Passenger — start low, climb, reach a boat. The pure escape.
• Ship's Officer — your authority forces locked doors, but you cannot leave until you have seen enough souls to safety.
• Stoker — at home in the machinery everyone else is frightened of. Fire the furnace, hold the power, and outrun a breach the others cannot.

And more — discoverable and unlockable by playing. We're not going to tell you how many, or who they are.

What's in it

• Real water — a communicating-vessels flood that settles into the lowest rooms first; open a door and the sea rushes through, or pile furniture in a hatch to dam it and buy time.
• The ship as a machine — power is a network of circuits; a flooding wing goes dark on its own, and you can reroute a dry wing's power to a drowned one — or triage a failing generator as she goes under.
• An AI storyteller — a Narrator paces your run and reacts to how you play. There is the honest Sea, and there are others — each a personality you can lean into or fight, and most of them you have to earn. We're not going to list them either.
• Belief & denial — keep your nerve and lead calm souls and the ship feels — and behaves — warmer and slower; let panic in and the cold comes with it.
• A physical, buoyant world — furniture lifts and drifts as a room floods; grab, carry, and shove it, and brace when the ship lurches and flings everything loose.
• A survival web — the freezing water drains your warmth and the cold can kill you, not just drowning; duck into boiler-room heat, or drink to hold off the chill.
• A whole ship to play in — she was built for a crossing, not for you, and almost every room still remembers what it was for. Machinery, instruments, games, and the odd door that has no business being where it is. Find out what they do.
• Runs that recombine — seeded, always-solvable levels, shareable seeds, leaderboards, and things to find that we are not going to list — plus early drop-in co-op with friends.

New in v0.1.22

• Nothing hangs over her side. The plating was drawn from the rooms of one deck. A deck with few rooms got a thin hull, and the ordinary staterooms above it looked like they were floating. Above the waterline her side now follows the widest deck at or above it, so the hull is continuous.
• You cannot walk through a boiler. They had no collision at all. They were also half outside the shell: the position the game knew about is the stokehold face, where the stoker stands, not the middle of the boiler.
• The lights below decks are not on a grid. A boiler room was lit where the work was. Lamps down there are further apart, off the grid, and about one in five is not fitted. Most portholes are dark now. Most cabins are empty.
• The water no longer shimmers. She floats with F deck at the waterline, and F deck's floor sat at exactly that height.
• The mouse is free unless you are aiming. A torch you are carrying takes it, or something you are about to throw. A crowbar swings at what you are facing.
• Tab gives the pointer back, so you can hover the map and pick through your kit.
• A thrown thing lands with a wooden thud. The old sound was a hatch closing. It is on the hatches now.

New in v0.1.21

• She goes down by the head. Water forward puts her bow down and lifts her stern, and the list across her is a separate thing that can happen at the same time. The sea stays level while she leans, which is the way round it actually was. Titanic was very nearly upright all night and it is the trim you feel; Lusitania rolls until her port boats are over the deck; Britannic does both, inside the hour. Once she is more than a couple of degrees over, the furniture stops being scenery and travels.
• The sea moves, and you can see it. It was a flat colour that only drew once your whole deck stood clear of the water. There is swell on it now, and it rises into view as it comes up to meet you.
• She has a house on her. Every room on the upper decks reached her side, so the superstructure read as hull with windows cut in it. The deckhouses are inset and the promenade runs outboard of them — a rail on the sea side to look over, a wall on the side that backs onto the house. Nothing hangs over her side any more.
• Doors are the width of what they are for. Every door aboard was 2.2 m, a barn door. A cabin door is 0.9 m now, a watertight door wider because it has to pass a stretcher, and the public rooms get the double doors they really had. Heavy things are heavy, too: a made-up berth is eighty kilos and you are not shifting it alone.
• The lights are not all one lamp. An alleyway gets a bulkhead lamp, a cabin one fitting, the public rooms chandeliers — all warm, and dim the way 1912 filaments were. Cabins nobody is in start dark, with a brass switch inside the door that throws. If her power has gone it still clicks and tells you nothing came on.
• The working parts of the ship are aboard her. The bridge has the wheel, both engine-room telegraphs, the binnacle and the chart table; the engine room its triple-expansion engines and the turbine that drove the centre screw. You cannot move them. You can look at them, and they tell you what they did. The boilers are the size boilers were, and somebody is finally playing at the band stand.
• She has a whistle, and it is Olympic's — same builder, same specification, and Olympic's survived where hers did not. Doors sound like doors and hatches like hatches, stoking sounds like coal going into a firebox, and water underfoot is its own sound rather than a dry footstep turned up: it is how you know the sea has reached you before you can see it.
• Read the room. Q inspects whatever you are in front of, Tab is one dashboard of map and kit, the mouse is yours again unless you are actually aiming something, and you can tell which way you are facing. Room notices stopped nagging.

New in v0.1.20

• Every room of Titanic, walked. The headless walker crosses all 453 rooms of the hub ship from the room beside each, every flight climbed and descended, with no faults — and that walk now gates every release again. Along the way: a body in a doorway seam no longer falls two decks; furniture stays out of corridors, doorways and the step-off at the head of every flight; the Second-Class Staircase and the E-deck entrance are clear.

New in v0.1.19

• Titanic at her true scale. The arrangement plans are framed at 36 inches through the midbody, not 24; the whole midship was packed a third too tight, and the bridge stood twenty-four metres too far aft. Every room now sits where the sheets put it, read off the plans' own frame ticks. The forecastle and poop have their real lengths.
• The Grand Staircase as she had it. One well, the same column of the ship from D deck to the dome, transcribed from the plans; in it the fanned central flight up to the landing, and the two side flights running port and starboard up to the deck above — on every deck. Walked from F deck to the boat deck and back down with no faults, in the headless test that now gates every release.
• Passengers stand five foot eight, with some variety; the player too.

New in v0.1.18

• The ship is walkable. The tall spaces — the boiler rooms, the engine room, the casings — ran their walls a full deck up into the rooms above them, unseen and solid across the doorways. That was the threshold you could not cross with nothing to see. They stop at the deck now.
• The plans are checked against themselves before a build ships: a door off its bulkhead, two rooms overlapping, a room nothing reaches. Three hulls, clean. Lusitania's boat deck goes end to end; Britannic's shaft-tunnel ladder comes up in the room that is actually over it; the hull plating steps at each room instead of running diagonally between them.
• The Grand Staircase fits its room, with a rail round every well and every stair hole. Stairs are walked, not used; E is for ladders, for hatches, and for a well with a crush in it.
• The Table. Seven storytellers tell the night, and one of them tells your run. Passengers carry their words without knowing whose they are, and in the black after a run they talk to each other; now and then one of them tells a story. Nobody is named.
• Doors are yours to open. Nothing swings open because you walked toward it, and a door will not close on anyone standing in it. The thing you are about to use glows — the thing itself. Hold the middle mouse button to look round; Home puts the camera back.
• And the rest: chess takes your move after the house replies, and the pawns show their side; the pointer comes back when you pause; the load card knows which ship it is talking about; a song for making it out.

Windows: unzip and run Foundering.exe, no installer (Windows may warn about an unsigned app: More info → Run anyway).  macOS: open the .dmg and drag Foundering to Applications. It's a universal build (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed but not notarised, so the first launch needs right-click → Open → Open — once only. The macOS build is one version behind at v0.1.20 while the Mac side of the build is sorted out.  Linux: unzip and run ./Foundering.x86_64 — a native build, no Wine needed. Alpha (v0.1.22) — a greybox build; expect rough edges. In active development; the source repository is private for now.  All releases →