FinTangle Live

FinTangle is a small reef puzzle I made for evenings when I want one clear problem and a board I can see all at once. A fish is waiting. Its home is waiting somewhere else. The water between them stays still until you give the current a shape. You choose a piece and set it on an empty cell. A push carries a fish straight ahead. A curve bends the route. A boost throws it farther in a single step. A split can open more than one way through the same square, and a whirlpool turns a fish when a straight line would only send it into trouble. You can rotate a piece before you trust it, and lift it off again if the path starts to feel crowded. When the board looks honest, you release the fish and watch the route play out. If two of them meet where they should not, the flow breaks and the board comes back to you. If every fish arrives, the next stretch of reef unlocks. Energy keeps a level from turning into a pile of pieces. Each current spends some of it, so the cheaper pieces are usually the ones worth trying first. The stars at the end are a comment on how lightly you built. Three of them means the fish got home without you spending the reef carelessly. Pearls lie on certain paths, and the nicer solutions pick them up on the way instead of ignoring them for a shorter line. The early water is kind. One blue fish, a few pushes, a goal you can almost see. Then the reef starts to argue. Rocks, coral and seaweed sit on cells you cannot build through, so the path has to go around a garden that was already there. Later you meet shells and gates that stay closed until a fish passes the right place, and switches that change a route only after someone swims across them. Some boards already contain currents you did not place. Those feel like finishing another person's sentence. You rotate what you are given, add as little as you can, and hope the fish agree. The map is five named stretches, eight levels each, forty in all. Shallow Reef teaches the push. Coral Maze asks you to turn. Blue Trench puts several fish on the board together. Sunken Garden gets tighter, with more of the reef already occupied. Deep Current is where the long routes live, the ones that need a boost, a split and a careful eye on the pearls. A level stays locked until the one before it is finished, so the difficulty arrives in order. If you want a stricter promise on a reef you already know, the challenges ask you to use fewer pieces, or to bring back every pearl before you call the level done. On days when I do not want a goal, I open the Flow Lab. It is an empty board. You can set down fish, homes, rocks, coral, seaweed and currents, then run the water just to see what a piece actually does. Nothing there is scored and nothing there unlocks. The Reef Log keeps the slower records. It shows the levels you have cleared, the stars you have earned out of one hundred and twenty, and the best pearl count from each board rather than a sum of every attempt. Each zone has its own line, so you can see whether you are still in the shallows or already down in the trench. A tide streak grows when you clear any story level on a new day. Miss a day and the current run rests, while the best one you have managed stays written down. Today's Current is a single level drawn from the reefs you have already opened. It does not change until the day does. Clear it and the log marks the tide as caught, though you can still swim it again for a cleaner route. You can undo a piece, ask for a hint, preview the route, or pause and come back. Hints, the grid and that preview can be turned off if you would rather play by eye. If you ever want the water completely still again, settings will clear your results, your pearls and your streak and put you back at the first reef. I tried not to hurry anyone. There is no clock, and there is nothing to buy your way through. You place a few currents, you release the fish, and you find out whether the path was kind.