SILT’s monochrome abyss reached the Apple Design finals

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 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 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. SILT is Abzû’s photographic negative: where that ocean overwhelms with color, Mead’s starves you of it.