Koi Rising: Calm Game

A pond on your screen, seen from above, and the koi know you are there. Hold your phone over the water and lean in. The school rises to meet you, the way koi crowd to someone standing at the edge of a pond. Draw back and they settle into the deep. Open your mouth, or move suddenly, and the whole pond scatters and dives for the bottom. The water is real water. Waves run at the speed their own length says they should, so the surface never repeats. Light catches the ripples. Rain comes and goes, wind gets up and dies away, and the weather is different in every pond. Eleven ponds, swiped left and right: • Clear Day — bright overcast water you can see a good way into • Ink Wash — sumi-e on paper, every koi in one loaded brush • Watercolour — wet-on-wet, the paper showing through • Moonlit — almost no light, and hard silver off the surface • Autumn — tannin-brown water with maples coming down on it • Last Light — the last half hour of sun, straight down the pond • Cherry Blossom — petals thick on pale spring water • Lantern Night — paper lanterns lit and set adrift • Jade Water — so clear it barely takes anything • Storm — flat grey water being rained on properly • Neon — magenta off the surface, koi in cyan, black water under both Drag across the screen and the boundary between one pond and the next follows your finger. The koi are koi, not sprites: • Each fish swims on its own clock. No two tails keep the same time. • They bend into a turn before the heading follows, and the tail sweeping against that curve is what pushes them round. • They stack through the whole depth of the pond. Some cruise the bottom, some hang at the surface. • Deep fish lose their colour the way water takes it: red first, then green, with blue carrying furthest — so a koi on the bottom is a dark shape and one at the surface is fully itself. • Kohaku, showa, utsuri, yamabuki and more, each with its own markings. Made to be calm: • Nothing on screen but the pond. No buttons, no scores, no timers, no streaks. • Nothing startles. No flashes, no jumps, no sound. • Face tracking runs entirely on your device. The camera picture is never shown, never saved and never sent anywhere. No ads, ever: • No interruptions, no pop-ups, no videos to watch. Safe to hand to a child. Requires an iPhone with a front camera and iOS 17 or later.