Sandkeeper

Sandkeeper is a game about pouring colored sand into glass bottles, a grain at a time, and keeping what you make. Lean the bottle and the layers slope. Poke the stick in and the layers follow it down. Tap the glass and the sand settles. Drop in a shell, a pebble, a piece of sea glass. When it looks right, cork it, name it, and store it on your window sill.

It is the sand art kit you had as a child, with the physics of real sand and a house to keep the bottles in. Nothing can fail and no score appears.

Your grandfather filled his time with sand: a book of forty eight places, and a bottle for every one of them. You inherit the cottage, the book, and the pages he never got to. A quay at low tide. The hills over Kyoto on the last night of the year. The crater at Ijen at two in the morning. A shore on Sanibel at dawn. Every page is a place drawn live in its own light, the sands it calls for, and three lines in his hand, with a line under them in hers.

Finish a page and something comes home from it: an oar, a paper lantern, a jar of wild flowers, a carved loon. Forty eight pages, thirty sand colors, fifty two keepsakes, and a room that fills as you go.

The room is yours to arrange. Shelves arrive as you fill them. Wallpaper, paint, curtains, a rug you can slide across the floor, keepsakes on their hooks, photographs in the frames. An entryway you can decorate. A porch where the mail comes, equipped with a stove, a plant that wants watering, and six old books on the shelf that nobody owns any more, whole, to read in the chair he read them in. A gull that takes to your window and a mouse under the desk.

The light through the window follows the clock on the wall.

Any bottle can be decorated and photographed, or sent to a friend as a code: no account, no server, nothing to sign up for.

Two more crafts wait in the house: sand boards to peel and pour, and a round tray of sand to draw on with a pen, where a wheel turns any scribble into a twelve fold flower.

The cottage has one more room to show you.

No timers, no currency, nothing to buy, nothing to lose. Sit down for ten minutes or an afternoon. Thirty quiet achievements. Every picture in the game is drawn while you watch, a line and a grain at a time, and every sound is made as it plays. The tide never comes in the same way twice.

• Real sand: pour, lean, tap, poke, and watch it settle

• 59 bottle shapes and 30 sand colors, with pebbles, shells, sea glass and coal to drop in

• Mix two sands in a jar to make a color of your own

• 48 pages of his book, each a real place at its own hour, drawn live

• Replay any bottle you've poured and watch it fill again

• A music box with its own tune for every place

• 52 keepsakes that come home to a cottage you decorate

• Photograph any bottle; send it to a friend as a code or the image itself, no account needed

• Sand boards and a sand tray: two more ways to make art with your sand

• The window follows the game's clock: dawn is dawn, midnight is midnight

• 30 achievements, written as things the house noticed

• No score, no timer, nothing to buy, nothing that can go wrong