Drink the Ocean · How to Play Drink the Ocean: Controls, Salt and Upgrades
How to Play Drink the Ocean: Controls, Salt and Upgrades
Drink the Ocean controls, start to finish
This page walks through a full run of Drink the Ocean: what the controls do, what the salt is for, and where the upgrades actually take you. It is written for someone who just pressed play and is standing on the beach with no idea why nothing is happening.
The controls
| Action | Desktop | Phone or tablet |
|---|---|---|
| Move | W, A, S, D | On-screen movement control |
| Look around | Mouse | Drag on the screen |
| Drink seawater | Left mouse button | Hold DRINK |
| Jump | Space bar | Jump button |
| Change tool | 1, 2, 3 | Tool buttons |
Four more desktop keys are easy to miss. These are the ones listed on the game's own page:
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| T | Go home |
| E | Open the duck's gifts |
| P | Settings |
| Tab | Free the mouse |
Tab is the one that saves you when the keyboard stops responding: it frees the pointer so you can click something on the page, and P is where the settings for the run live. E matters more than it looks, because the Sky Duck's gifts are free progress and a lot of players never open them.
The game is first person, so the mouse (or a drag on a phone) is how you aim. You have to be facing the water and close enough to it for a drink to count, which is the first thing that catches people out: standing in the middle of the beach and clicking does nothing.
Step 1: drink
Walk down to the waterline, face the ocean and hold the drink button. Your character fills up, and the water level in front of you drops. In the first minutes the amount you can take is small, so the level moves in a way that is almost impossible to see. That is normal. The whole design is about turning those sips into something bigger.
Step 2: press the salt
Once you are full, walk to the PRESS and use it. Your stomach empties and the water you drank comes out as salt. This is the step that makes the game look broken if you skip it: you can drink for ten minutes, and if you never press, you will have nothing to spend.
Step 3: spend the salt in the shop
The SHOP is the blue pad, and it is where a run turns into progress. The upgrades on offer include:
- A bigger belly, so a single pull of water is worth more before you have to press again.
- Extra straws, which expand how much you can drink in one go.
- A mouth vacuum, a tool for pulling water in faster than sipping allows.
- Pocket whirlpools, another tool you unlock through the shop.
Buy what you can afford, go back to the water, and repeat. Each upgrade shortens the walk and raises the volume, so the same beach that felt slow at the start starts emptying in visible steps.
What you are working towards
Lowering the water level is the goal, and the game pays it off in stages. As the level falls you uncover a shipwreck, then a whale skeleton, then a sunken city at the bottom. When you reach the bottom you can pull the plug, and the next ocean arrives: cola, lemonade, slime or lava. A duck in the sky hands out gifts along the way, and achievements track the run.
There is no win screen in the usual sense. The run keeps widening instead of ending, which is why the leaderboard score matters more than a finish line: Playgama's leaderboard for the game tops out around 32,295.
One thing to do before you start
Drink the Ocean does not save progress. Playgama's page for the game marks saving as No, so do not plan a run across two sittings: closing or reloading the tab puts you back at the first ocean with the smallest belly. Treat it as a session game and take a screenshot when you hit a score you care about.
If the controls feel wrong
Three quick checks fix most of it. First, make sure the game area has focus: click once inside the game before using the keyboard. Second, if the movement keys stop responding, press Tab to free the mouse and click back into the play area. Third, on a phone, play in landscape and use the fullscreen button under the game frame; portrait squeezes the play area and the on-screen controls land awkwardly.