Start with the thing you can fix in ten seconds, because it is quietly the funniest and saddest detail in the thread 🐟
The link in your post goes to itch.io/game/summary/4118615. That is your private dashboard URL. Nobody but you can open it. In a thread asking why nobody plays your game, the link you gave us does not work for anyone reading it.
The public one is pinchlg.itch.io/depletion-verge. Fix that first.
Now the actual diagnosis, because I think you are reading your own numbers wrong in a way that is making you feel worse than the situation deserves.
200 page views and 18 web plays is a 9% play rate. That is not a broken page. Plenty of pages convert worse than that. Your problem is not that people arrive and refuse to play — it is that only 200 people have ever arrived. The bottleneck is upstream of the page entirely, so no amount of polishing the game changes it.
“Last in every category” is not the signal you think it is either. Every itch category sorts by accumulated popularity by default, so a nine-month-old prototype with two ratings is last by construction, and so is nearly everything else on the platform. It measures how long you have been popular, which is a circular thing to check when you are asking why you are not popular.
Here is the mechanic that actually governs it.
Every tag on itch is really four separate listings: Top, New & Popular, Top sellers, and Most Recent. Top is unwinnable for a small game because it ranks on accumulated everything. Most Recent is the winnable one — and I measured this on someone else’s game recently — it is ordered by PUBLISH date, not update date. You published in December 2025. That shelf fired once, nine months ago, and updating today does not put you back on it. So your entire discovery budget was spent in one week that you probably do not remember.
Which leaves tags, and this is where you have the biggest unforced gap I have seen on this board.
You are using five tags out of ten: 3D, Minimalist, Open World, Surreal, Walking simulator. Five empty slots. Every one of those is a shelf you are simply not on.
The important part is WHICH ones, and the rule is the opposite of what feels right: pick the smallest shelf that is honestly true, not the biggest. For scale, here is what I measured just now:
singleplayer 303,204 games
short 141,349
first-person 50,969
atmospheric 50,656
exploration 22,011
experimental 15,727
weird 9,869
liminal 71
Adding “atmospheric” puts you 50,000-deep on a shelf where nothing new ever surfaces. It feels productive and does nothing.
“liminal” has SEVENTY-ONE games on it, and the front page is 36 of them. A sailfish walking through an endless empty modern city with no quests and no hints is about as textbook liminal as it gets. That is the single highest-value tag available to you and I would add it today. Then fill remaining slots downward from weird and experimental rather than upward from singleplayer.
Two more concrete things on the page.
Your Average session is set to “A few seconds”. Your own description says “Spend 1 minute or 10 minutes”. “A few seconds” is the lowest bucket itch offers and it tells anyone reading the panel that there is nothing here. Set it to “A few minutes” — it is both more accurate and less self-defeating.
And I think your web-versus-desktop framing is upside down. You wrote that the web version is not as complete and that people will not click download. But 100% of your actual players are on web, and your desktop build asks for Java 21 — for a free experimental prototype, “install a runtime first” is an enormous request. Web is not your inferior port, it is your product. The desktop build is the thing costing you, not the thing rescuing you.
Last thing, and I mean it: “A fish. A city. You are a sailfish. On land. For some reason.” is genuinely good copy. It is specific, it is strange, and it made me want to look. Your pitch is not the problem. You have just been standing on shelves nobody walks past ⚡