ABYSS

Dive deep with one touch.

ABYSS is a one-touch dive into a deep-sea trench for iPhone and iPad. Tap to pulse upward; gravity does the rest. That is the entire control scheme, and it is the easy part. There is no finish line — depth is counted in metres and the trench keeps going, the water running faster, the gaps in the rock closing up and the gates crowding together the deeper you get, through three zones on the way down: Twilight, the Midnight zone at 300 m, and the Hadal dark at 800 m. Light is life. Your glow decays from the moment you push off and it sets how far ahead you can see, while plankton drifting between the rocks charges it back up. Running out is not death — it is the trench going black around you while you keep diving on memory and nerve. Down there are rock gates that tighten with depth, violet jellies drifting across the Midnight zone, lethal and softly lit, hydrothermal vents in the Hadal that will not kill you but will shove you into something that will, and anglers holding station behind a warm, flickering lure — bright things down here are not always food. A Game Center leaderboard keeps your deepest dive, five achievements run from your first Midnight crossing to 2,500 plankton, your best depth and total plankton follow you between your devices over iCloud, and Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets show your record. No ads, no in-app purchases, no account and no sign-up; it plays entirely offline, and sound and haptics can each be switched off. Nothing in the game is a stored picture or a recording: every rock, every creature and every note of the score is generated by the app while you play. Portrait. Requires iOS 18.