Once a year, at the end of the season, the boats on the Vinkeveense Plassen put their lights on and go round in a line. People stand on their own decks and watch it go past. It is called the Nacht van Neptunus, and it is one of the few nights on this water where the whole point of a boat is to be looked at.
The game can do that now.
Put ?neptunus=1 on the end of the play URL and none of the game happens. No lake picker, no hire desk, no name, no HUD, no boat of your own. The clock stops at night — properly at night, with the last of the west still separating the treeline from the sky — and thirty-six boats come round the Noordplas in line astern, one behind the other, every one of them lit.
That is the better part of a kilometre of boats. More than fits in one view, which is the point: a parade you cannot see the end of is a parade, and one you can count is a queue.
Each boat carries a string of bulbs round its own sheer and a tent of them from a peak over the wheelhouse down to the bow, the stern and both beams. The strings follow the shape of the hull they are on, so a sloep is lit in the shape of a sloep and the motoryacht in the shape of a motoryacht. Every boat has its own colours — warm white, ice blue, red and gold, a whole fairground on one of them — and its own chase running along the strings at its own speed, in its own direction.
Bootje Kroket is in the line. So is Freedom, palm trees and all. So is the Patatboot. One of each, spread through the procession at thirds, so somebody you recognise comes past every minute or so.
And every one of them lays a column of light down the black water toward you, because that is what a lit boat actually does, and it is most of what the evening looks like.
There is nothing to play. You watch. The view keeps changing on its own — off the beam at deck height, high and wide, down on the surface with the boats going by within a few metres, out across open water with the parade as a bright thread on a dark plas — and it never settles into the same one twice running. Press space or click if you want the next one sooner. F is full screen. C brings the caption back.
Start it, and leave it running.