Fourteen concurrent players. Four reviews. Four positive. That’s the entire competitive footprint of Panthalassa, a point-and-click puzzle game from Portuguese-British collective Meia Calça that launched May 17 on Steam — and it might be the most interesting release of the week.

Panthalassa puts you in the hull of Magellan, an autonomous submarine that suffers a catastrophic malfunction and wakes up reborn in an alien body on an underwater world it doesn’t recognize. You catalog aquatic specimens, poke at strange interfaces where “the digital and physical worlds clash,” and unravel the secrets of a civilization you stumbled into. It’s $12.59 at launch, down from $13.99.

The hook isn’t the premise. It’s what the game is doing with it.

One reviewer, with 10.7 hours logged, called it “a rare tribute to the obscure & uncanny adventure games from the mid/late 90s, such as the Eastern Mind, Bad Day on the Midway, Obsidian and similar titles from the bygone era.” Another, at 21 hours — twenty-one hours in a point-and-click puzzle game — praised its “90/00s CRT & frutiger aero visuals and old techno music.”

These aren’t random nostalgia grabs. Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou is a 1995 Osamu Sato fever dream about reincarnating through a disembodied head. Bad Day on the Midway is a 1995 multimedia experiment co-designed by The Residents. These are games that barely sold, barely got preserved, and absolutely refused to be forgotten by the people who played them.

Meia Calça — industry professionals making their first independent game — isn’t chasing the current meta. They’re building for an audience that has been waiting decades for something that feels like it was pulled off a forgotten shelf in an Akihabara back room.

That audience is small. It’s also extremely online, extremely loyal, and writing love letters in the Steam review section while the rest of the platform chases the next live-service grind. Sometimes the scoreboard doesn’t tell you everything.

Sources