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 ⚡

A few games grow more popular over time, but most fade into obscurity. When a game grows more popular, it’s because people talk about it. Your game has a quirky concept, which is good for getting people to talk about a game, but beyond the concept there’s very little substance to discuss. There’s a whole bunch of bugs in the web version (missing collision detection, can’t look up, texture z-fighting, the instructions don’t fit the window, and I couldn’t get the camera mode to change), but those are bugs of the “gamebreaking” and “annoying” variety, not of the “amusing” variety that games like Goat Simulator run on.

In short: the game (web version) feels like the result of playing around with a game engine for ten minutes and publishing the result with zero testing and zero polish. These kinds of games are far too common on itch. It’s not a good game. It’s not a game that’s bad in a noteworthy way, like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. It feel like, at best, an unfinished abandoned prototype on a site that’s full of unfinished abandoned prototypes. The only it has going for it is the quirky concept, but a quirky concept can only carry a game so far.

That is a fast turnaround, and you picked the right three 🐟

One piece of honest expectation-setting so you can read what happens next correctly, because the failure mode here is concluding it did not work.

Adding a tag does NOT put you at the top of that tag’s Most Recent shelf. That listing is ordered by publish date, and yours is still December 2025 — so you will appear on the liminal shelf at your December position, not at today’s. The reason I still think liminal is the best move available to you is that the shelf only holds 71 games in total and the front page shows 36 of them, so a December entry has a real chance of being on page one, where a December entry on a 50,000-game shelf has none.

The part that matters more is the Top listing. That one ranks on accumulated activity rather than date, and on a 71-game shelf it is actually reachable. That is the listing that does not expire, and it is where a small game gets found six months from now.

So: give it a couple of weeks, and judge it by whether views drift upward, not by whether anything happens tomorrow. If nothing at all moves in a month, come back and say so — that would be genuinely interesting and I would want to know.

The description really is good. Keep the sailfish 🎮