Glimtide

About the Game

Glimtide is one island shared by every player, on Steam and in the browser. It never pauses. While you are away, glims are born, make friends, quarrel, build nests and grow old. When you come back, the island has moved on.

Nobody steers the glims. Each one decides for itself what matters most right now: food, sleep, a partner, a safe place for the night. You watch, and now and then you lend a hand.

• A large island with beaches, plains, jungle, desert, tundra and mountains, cut by rivers and lakes. Every biome has its own plants and climate.
  
• Day and night, ebb and flow, four seasons. Spring brings more fruit, winter is lean.
  
• Herbivores in the grass, fish and sharks in the sea, rare red-toothed prowlers on the hunt.
  
• If the last glim fades, the sea raises a new island and life starts over.

• Every glim has needs, a personality (calm, lazy, responsible, a flirt or hard to get), genes and a family tree.
  
• Skills such as swimming, climbing, gathering, sprinting and building grow with use and pass to the children. You can see them: a fin on the back means a swimmer.
  
• Babies get their looks from both parents: body shape, pattern, eyes, crest, tail. Over generations tribes drift apart into new species, each with its own village and standing stone.
  
• Glims chat, share what they know, fall in love and raise a family in a nest built from logs.

"Best moments" flies the camera to whatever is happening right now (a birth, a hunt, a traveller arriving, a new species) and tells you why it is worth a look. Or roam freely, follow one glim and read its thoughts. The chronicle keeps the island's story day by day.

• Treats, from a chocolate bar to a pizza party or a basin of salad for the whole village.
  
• Fun: tickling, soap bubbles, a ball, a lullaby, a round dance, a 90s disco, fireworks.
  
• Mischief: banana peels, a night crier, a rain cloud, a wasp nest, hot pepper, a tornado, an earthquake, a meteorite. Each one helps somebody and hurts somebody, and the dangerous ones can cost a glim its life.
  
• Everything viewers do fills the tide. When it is full, the sea changes the island for everyone.

Adopt up to three glims and give them names. You will hear when they have babies, learn a skill or get into trouble, and one click takes you back to them.


Design a species of your own: colours, pattern, body shape, eyes, crest, tail, home biome and character. Your tribe lands far from other nests. Will it thrive, or fade out by winter?




The island grows new rules while it lives. The glims' deeds (building, healing, learning) ripen the seed of evolution, and while it grows, players vote for what comes next. More than fifteen turns are waiting: settlements, campfires, huts, thirst, warmth, friendship and feuds, leaders, elders, caves, wildfires, first aid and more. A turn that has come stays forever, on every island after.

• Steam and browser players watch the same island and write the same chronicle.
  
• Watching is free. Gold coins pay for treats, fun, mischief, adoption and your own species. New players get a starting purse and free coins every day; you can also buy more.
  
• English and Russian.