Landfall

Las Ánimas, March 1791. HMS Alert landed five observers of the Board of Longitude on five islands and never came back for them. The Governor of St. Clement gives you the schooner Petrel, a small crew and a chart nobody trusts; an old captain gives you his sextant. Find them, all five, and bring them home – before thirst and fever do.

Landfall is a sailing and navigation simulator in the first person. There is no map marker and no compass needle pointing to the goal. You find your position the way it was done at the end of the eighteenth century: the sun at noon for your latitude, a time sight and the chronometer for your longitude, stars at twilight, the Pole Star, lunar distances when you no longer trust the clock – and the day's work from the log, the course and the leeway in between. You raise the sextant yourself, bring the sun down to a horizon that rises and falls with the swell, read the vernier, look up the Nautical Almanac, work the sight in the workbook and plot it on the chart with ruler and dividers.

The sea is simulated, not scripted: the trade wind and its squalls, the currents that set you west, tides, swell and a schooner that sails like one – she points no higher than the wind allows, makes leeway, has to tack and wear, heaves to, drags her anchor and can go aground. The sky is the real sky of 1791: the sun, the moon and the planets where they were, thousands of stars, refraction, twilight and dark nights. The islands are not quite where the chart puts them.

Three eras: 1620 with a wooden cross-staff and the reckoning alone (hardest), 1791 with sextant and chronometer (as it was done), and 2026 in a motor yacht with GPS and a chart plotter – which still does not know where the islands are. The mate can read the instruments and look up the tables for you, and a calculator in the master's book holds the formulas, ready to fill in. A full book of instructions is aboard, and a gramophone with five records.

Needs a desktop browser with WebGL 2, a keyboard and a mouse and a reasonably strong graphics card. Log in to keep your progress in the cloud: the game autosaves at every landfall and has three manual save slots.