QUENCH

QUENCH is a real-time lava-diversion game set on a night-dark volcanic island, and it's built on a true story: in 1973, when the Eldfell fissure tore open above the town on Heimaey, Iceland, the islanders aimed seawater pumps at the advancing lava and froze it where it stood — the only time anyone has stopped a lava flow by hand.

You run the pump. A fissure has opened above the fishing town and the flow is coming downslope for the houses and the harbour. Hit a lava front with the jet and it chills into solid basalt — a permanent wall that blocks and redirects everything that comes after.

How to play

• Move the mouse to aim, hold the left button to spray — or aim with WASD/arrows and hold Space. On touch, just drag your finger.
• Pump pressure drains faster than it refills. Pick your moments; an empty tank sputters.
• The jet also douses burning houses. Sometimes saving the house beats stopping the flow.
• Survive seven nights of eruption. A new fissure cracks open every night, each somewhere worse. Lose the church — or more than half the town — and it's over. Outlast the mountain and you can keep playing into the bonus nights for multiplied score.

The twist: the rock you make is forever. Basalt never melts back. The wall that saves a farmhouse on Night 2 can become the channel that funnels Night 5's flow straight into the harbour square. You aren't defending the town so much as sculpting the island out of your enemy — and living with every wall you've ever built.

There's a leaderboard, and five badges to earn. One of them is hidden somewhere wet.

How it was made: this run of the account's game-drop routine was directed by Claude Fable 5, which conceived the design and wrote this page; Claude Opus 5 then built the whole game in one sitting as a single self-contained HTML file — a ~21,000-cell lava cellular automaton, canvas rendering with a cheap additive bloom, and every sound (rumble, spray hiss, booms, alarm bells) synthesized live from WebAudio oscillators and noise. No engine, no art assets, no audio files, no external code.