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Ritual Descent: Emergence, Beta 4 is now public. 🖤🐟
After several rounds of private testing, I’m finally opening the reservoir for anyone to explore. This is the first solo interactive artwork I’ve made on this scale, so letting it out into the world feels like a pretty big moment.
Ritual Descent: Emergence is an atmospheric audiovisual artwork set beneath Blackwater Reservoir in Harrowden. You move through a flooded landscape of concrete pillars, drowned structures, shifting light and submerged traces of the people who were there before you.
It’s less a traditional game than a slow, immersive digital art and sound installation. You can explore freely, stay still and watch the world change around you, or let the automatic camera carry you through the water.
Thousands of fish inhabit the reservoir, but most of their movement isn’t pre-animated or directed from the centre. Each fish follows a small set of local behaviours, responding to its neighbours, the surrounding architecture and the changing conditions in the water.
From those simple interactions, larger formations emerge. Shoals gather, divide, spiral and scatter without any single fish controlling the whole. A pattern can spread through the reservoir, hold for a few seconds and then collapse back into disorder. Much of what you see exists only for a moment and may never return in quite the same form.
That tension between the uncontrolled and the deliberate shapes the entire visual world. Light catches thousands of moving bodies. Shadows collect beneath drowned structures. Fleeting shapes appear inside the shoals and disappear before you’re quite sure what you saw. Sometimes the reservoir feels calm and almost meditative; at other times it becomes dense, ceremonial or unsettling.
Alongside the constantly shifting simulation are a number of choreographed rituals. During these moments, the reservoir briefly draws its separate systems together: fish, light, sound and architecture begin to move with a more deliberate purpose.
Even then, the outcome is never completely fixed. The live simulation continues to shape the formations, giving each ritual a recognisable structure without allowing it to unfold in exactly the same way twice.
There is no pre-recorded soundtrack. Every sound is generated live through synthesis, using layers of oscillators, filtered noise, resonant tones, echoes and underwater textures that respond to what is happening inside the reservoir.
Some of the stranger fish calls and song-like voices come from a homemade speech-synthesis system. Instead of recorded samples, it builds voices from breath, tones and fragments of artificial speech.
The fish, atmosphere, movement and rituals all help shape the audio, so the soundscape emerges alongside the visual world rather than simply playing over it. No two visits should look or sound exactly the same.
At the centre of the work is a simple idea: complex, intelligent and beautiful things can grow without a central authority directing them.
The fish have no permanent leader and no understanding of the larger patterns they create together. Each one only responds to what is nearby, yet collectively they produce something far beyond the actions of any individual.
That idea runs quietly through the wider world of the reservoir too: cooperation and control, collective behaviour, abandoned infrastructure, buried histories and the remains of institutions that believed everything could be measured, ordered and contained. It isn’t presented as a direct argument, but it sits beneath the surface, shaping how the world moves and what it remembers.
As you explore, you may also uncover traces of the Moorfolk, forgotten rituals, submerged history and a place that seems to remember more than it should.
Beta 4 should work on both PC and mobile, although it’s definitely best experienced on a PC with headphones.
This is still a beta, and I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. Bugs, performance problems, confusing moments, strange discoveries—or simply how it felt to spend some time beneath the water—are all useful.
Thank you to everyone who helped test the earlier versions. The reservoir is open now. Come and see what is moving beneath the surface.
Enter Blackwater Reservoir:
Hope you enjoy it.