Things We Lost in the Flood is a new, free-to-play indie MMO with a brilliant twist: It's a massively multiplayer "loneliness simulator" where each player is set adrift on a boat in a post-apocalyptic world that's been flooded over. So instead of forming into groups or communicating via chat or instant message, players can write and send messages in bottles for other players to find. Some of those messages can advance the game (more on that below), or simply just be personal expressions, anonymously shared and set adrift into the pixelated sea.

Created by indie developer Dean Moynihan of Awkward Silence Games (who also created the acclaimed, deeply moving game One Chance), Things We Lost was first conceived to be massively multiple storytelling game:

"The original idea was for players to find notes that I had written, to tell a short story out of order," he tells me. "However, I'm no writer... Once I figured out a way for the players to be doing all the prose work, it was smooth sailing from there."

That decision enhanced his intent to simulate loneliness: "The only thing that could feel more lonely than floating in the middle of the ocean by yourself," he explains, "would be floating in the middle of the ocean by yourself -- and reading notes from other living people."

Though the game has only been out for a short time, players have written over 6,000 notes to each other, running the gamut of useful to the game, to creatively discursive, to surprisingly profound: