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# SILT’s monochrome abyss reached the Apple Design finals
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/silts-monochrome-abyss-reached-the-apple-design-finals/
- Published: 2026-09-11T17:00:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T17:00:16.000Z
- Description: Illustrator Tom Mead’s underwater world put Spiral Circus beside Cyberpunk 2077 at Apple Park
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: SILT, Spiral Circus, Tom Mead, Apple Design Awards, apple, steam, adventure, News

Apple named 36 finalists for this year’s Apple Design Awards across six categories, and the strangest thing on the list was four years old. *SILT*—Spiral Circus’s monochrome puzzle-adventure about a diver possessing sea creatures at the bottom of a lightless ocean—made the [Visuals and Graphics shortlist](https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/story/id1896567319?ref=killscreen.com) beside *Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition* and *Arknights: Endfield*. The category eventually went to Night City, which is its own kind of compliment: a hand-inked eel was up against one of the most expensive skylines ever rendered.

Tom Mead drew that eel. The illustrator, who works under the name Mr Mead and co-founded Spiral Circus with creative director Dom Clarke, built the game’s entire underwater world out of ink; released [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1325890/SILT/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2022 and published by Fireshine Games, it still looks like nothing else on the platform. Apple’s citation singles out the camerawork—the view tightening to squeeze through tunnels, then pulling back until your diver is a fleck beside something vast. That instinct for the ocean as a canvas of scale and dread is one Killscreen has traced before, in [the luminous depths of *Abzû*](https://www.killscreen.com/abzu-2/). *SILT* is *Abzû*’s photographic negative: where that ocean overwhelms with color, Mead’s starves you of it.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/silt-screenshot-2.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/silt-screenshot-3.jpg)

**SILT* screenshots via Steam.

Killscreen has been following hand-drawn game worlds from **Abzû* to **SILT* for over a decade. The free Radar letter brings the next three finds to your inbox every week.

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