How it works
Three rules. That’s the whole game.
Swap neighbours to line up three of a kind. Chains multiply the score.
Four in a line forge a current, which sweeps its whole row or column. An L or a T forges a burst.
Five forge a pearl. Swap it with any creature and it claims every creature of that kind on the board.
The descent
A thousand levels. Five waters.
The levels descend from sunlit water into the trench, through five zones that each read like a different sea. New creatures join the deal on the way down — eight by the end — and in the deep the board stops being a square.
Sunlit Water
Learn the sea
Twilight
The light thins
Midnight
Corners go missing
Abyssal
Taller than wide
The Trench
The floor of the game
Not one of them can be skipped. The next level is always one past the deepest you’ve solved — a level that beats you is hard, not unfair.
Ten levels down, the free tide opens: an endless mode in three waters — easy, medium, hard — each keeping its own best score.
Level design
Every level was proved winnable before it shipped.
Each level is a dealt board with its own goal — reach a score, gather a creature, forge a mark — and each was played to the end by a bot before release: no perks, no favours, inside the move budget, all one thousand of them.
Difficulty is measured, not guessed. The bot’s win rate is the honest number, and the curve is tuned so the difficulty climbs rather than jumps.
And none of them needs anything from the pouch. Bare hands reach the trench floor.
The same thousand levels ship on every device. No server, no daily shuffle, nothing generated behind your back — tide nº 90001 is the same deal for you as for everyone else. It’s the one playing at the top of this page.
The secrets
Six things the game never explains.
Swap two specials into each other and something happens that the rules never mention. There are six of them, and the name that flashes is the reward for stumbling. Finding one is the best thing in here.
Riptide
Tsunami
Maelstrom
Undertow
Sea Quake
Pearl Storm
All six work on the board above, too. It keeps the secret just as well.
Feel
Designed around the swap.
- A tick under your finger for every match, and a firmer pulse when something forges. Both switchable.
- Every sound is synthesised as you play — thirteen of them, from the smallest pop to the pearl storm, and not a single audio file.
- A dead board reshuffles itself, free and automatically. No move is never the game’s answer.
- Reduce Motion is honoured everywhere — the sea calms down, the game doesn’t.
- Never colour alone: every creature has its own shape, so two of them never have to be told apart by hue.
- AA contrast throughout, from the level map down to the smallest caption.
Free to download
The pouch is optional.
Helmi is free to download, and all thousand levels are there from the first launch. What’s for sale is refills of the pouch — more moves, a pearl sweep, a fresh board — and the pouch fills itself anyway: one of each, free, every ten levels down.
No level needs anything from it. No subscription, no ads, and no upsell in the middle of a move.
Every device
Your descent follows you.
Solved levels, free-tide bests and the pouch sync through your own iCloud, so the iPad picks up where the iPhone left off.
There is no account and no server of ours — the record lives in your iCloud, readable by your devices and nobody else.
Twelve languages
All of it translated.
Not just the menus — the rules, the goals, and the small line of encouragement when a new water opens.
Private by design
No accounts. No ads. No analytics.
Helmi collects nothing — no tracking, no advertising, no third-party SDKs, nothing to sign up for. Its privacy manifest declares no collected data at all.
Your descent is yours: on your device, and in your iCloud.
More from us
Same promise, different puzzle.
Support
Questions? Ideas? A level that feels wrong?
Helmi is made by one person who reads every email. Bug reports, feature requests, or a deal you think is unfair:
offline@dresende.pt