Swimming with Sharks

Something has gone wrong on a pleasure cruise: a guest is dead, there's a knife where a knife has no business being, and the game hands you the job of working out what happened before the trip is over. Swimming with Sharks plays it for dark comedy rather than dread — the tone lands somewhere between a cozy mystery and a shrug emoji — and js13kgames.com's own judged results for 2022 back up what's obvious in five minutes of play: 10th place out of the entire field for gameplay, 17th for controls, both genuinely strong, specific results rather than a vague popularity number.

Confirmed as real investigation, not a click-through

The distinction that matters here is the same one that separates a slideshow from an adventure game: does tapping a specific thing in the scene produce a specific response, or does any tap just advance the same script? This was tested directly rather than assumed. Early dialogue advanced on any tap, as expected for a scripted opening. But tapping precisely on one character's hitbox — not the deck, not the other character standing next to him, but that exact figure — produced a unique line, "That's me!", distinct from anything a blind tap nearby had triggered. The identical result came from a mouse click on the equivalent scaled position on desktop. That's real point-and-click investigation, backed by a DOM structure that names dozens of individually clickable characters, rooms and objects (a knife, a watch, goggles, a bra, a laxative — this being that kind of mystery).

A real flaw, not a nitpick

One problem shows up independently in this review's own testing and in the competition's own record, described in almost identical terms both times: the small arrows used to walk between the boat's rooms are so pale against the sky-blue background that they're genuinely difficult to spot. A js13k judge documented getting stuck badly enough to open the browser console and manually force game-state variables just to progress, specifically because "the arrow up and to the right of the cabin" was nearly invisible — and said so plainly: "you need to at least put a solid border around them or something." Screenshots taken for this review, on both phone and desktop, show exactly the same low-contrast arrows the judge described. For a control that's the primary way to move around the entire game, that's a real usability problem rather than a matter of taste, and it's the one thing standing between this and a notably higher score.

The other consistent gap, echoed by several separate commenters, is silence: the game has no audio, and more than one player specifically wished for sound effects to land its comic timing — "apart from the knife in his head, he looks unharmed" lands harder with a beat of music behind it than without one.

Final verdict

This is a well-built, funny, dark little mystery that a genuinely large slice of its own competition's judges rated among the best gameplay and controls of that entire year, and its point-and-click interaction was directly confirmed to work correctly on both touch and mouse. The faint navigation arrows are a real, documented flaw worth fixing rather than dismissing, and the total silence is a second, smaller one — but neither one erases what multiple people independently called one of the best entries of its year. Worth a slot on the shelf.