Confession time: as a ’90s arcade rat I believed every action hero wielded either a shotgun, a sword, or the power of vaguely elemental spikes. Then Sink or Swim (DOS, 1993) splashed into my life like a rubber duck lobbed from low-Earth orbit. Imagine Lemmings transplanted to a half-sunk luxury liner; swap your malleable rodents for panicky “Dim Passengers” wobbling in water wings, and replace the Pied-Piper chip-tune with a ragtime MIDI that sounds like elevator jazz drowning in bilge. Bizarre or classic? Irresistibly both. If underrated means “quieter than it deserved,” the game still fits; it married real-time herding puzzles with twitch-perfect platforming a full year before Oddworld made slapstick tragedy fashionable. Overrated? Only if bright VGA palettes trigger allergic reactions. Fundamental? Oh yes, escort missions, babysitting quests, even Ico’s hand-holding DNA can trace distant cousins here. (Rhetorical question: do inflatable ducks count as personal-flotation devices? Self-answer: here they double as reserve hit points, so grab a beak and pray.)
Historical Context
By the early ’90s Ocean Software had cornered the tie-in market, Addams Family, Jurassic Park, a buffet of movie licenses. Yet Ocean’s sister label Zeppelin wanted an original IP rather than another Hollywood reskin. Programmer Mark Betteridge pitched a rescue puzzler for Amiga in late ’92. Marketing renamed the DOS conversion Sink or Swim for its mid-1993 release. The PC port came on two 3.5-inch floppies, ran on a humble 286, and supported optional AdLib/Sound Blaster music credited to in-house duo Alex Aldroyd & Neil Crossley (Patrick Phelan scored the earlier Amiga build).
The macro-trend was clear: post-Lemmings publishers craved ways to reskin “save-’em-all” gameplay. Psygnosis had suicidal rodents; Silicon & Synapse would soon launch stranded Vikings; Titus had mice running amok. Zeppelin eyed Hollywood’s mini-disaster revival (whispers of James Cameron’s Titanic script already swirled) and found its motif: a swamped cruise ship stuffed with slapstick. The era’s magazine racks were jammed; Doom and Myst loomed, but Sink or Swim caught my preteen eye in a bargain-bin jewel case screaming “SAVE EMERGENCY DIM PASSENGERS!”
I installed it at XP Arcade, slotted next to the Quake shareware station. A Post-it challenge read: “Beat Level 4, play free.” No one claimed it; Level 4 introduces the downright sadistic valve-timing puzzle we’ll bemoan shortly. The clerk said Ocean’s US distributor buried stock between James Pond 3 and Cool Spot. Yet cult chatter bubbled; BBS users traded passwords the length of Dickens paragraphs, lamenting that rebooting erased your precious string.
Mechanics
Kevin Codner and the Buoyancy Clause
Boot the executable: a rollicking ragtime loop greets you, then a cutaway silhouette of the doomed S.S. Lucifer fills the screen. At the center stands Kevin Codner, junior engineer, plumber’s-crack hero, and glaring pun on Kevin Costner, clad in yellow hard-hat and blue overalls. Each single-screen level tasks Kevin with escorting Dim Passengers to a “WAY OUT” hatch before a panic meter tops out.
Controls are direct: arrow keys move; Space performs context actions, picking up passengers, yanking levers, pressing floor buttons. Kevin can carry only one passenger at a time; the rest stumble along ground paths or stand petrified, waiting to be herded manually. Here lies the Buoyancy Clause: everyone floats, briefly. Kevin and his charges bob for about two seconds, just long enough to swim to a ladder, then they sink like bowling pins. Tension spikes when rising water meets stubborn AI pathing, and level layouts weaponise that two-second mercy with drowned-rat precision.
Valve Ballet, Conveyor Choreography
Early stages, Engine Deck and Tourist Cabins, teach valve logic: turn clockwise to pump out water, anticlockwise to redirect. By Level 4 (“Scald Zone”) you must sync three valves so scalding steam jets cycle off exactly when your slow-moving Dim Passenger waddles through. Unlike Lemmings, where skills attach to AI, Sink or Swim grounds every solution in Kevin’s pixel body: miss the valve window and he’s trapped on the wrong side watching a rubber-ring tourist vaporise.
Later areas add seesaws that fling passengers, color-coded keycards, conveyor belts draped over lava grates, and buoyant barrels that double as elevator platforms. Physics matters more than it first appears. In the Cargo Hold sequence, filling a tank raises floating crates; overfill by half a tile and those crates crush the queue of Dim Passengers you meticulously corralled, rocketing the panic gauge to red in seconds.
Difficulty, Passwords, and the Long String Curse
The DOS build spans 60 levels (console ports later bloated to 100). Each completed stage reveals a nine- to ten-character password, “RINGWORLD”, “FIELDSOFDOOM”, “KRAKENFIRE”, that saves your progress. Forget one letter and you’re back to square one. Telephone culture in ’93 meant reciting “K-R-A-K-E-N-F-I-R-E” five times to be sure; mis-hearing a vowel derailed friendships.
Late-game spikes include the Ballast Tank trilogy, forcing split-second ladder climbs while water gushes upward, and Level 58 (“Captain’s Quarters”), infamous for a zig-zag elevator whose call button sits across a pit of sparking conduits. You end up crate-juggling passengers onto a seesaw, timing jumps like Super Meat Boy years before Edmund McMillen’s masochistic masterpiece.
Art & Sound Palette
Zeppelin’s artists squeezed expressive sprites from the VGA 256-color frontier. Kevin scratches his hard-hat, passengers chew fingernails, steam vents animate in four-frame puffs. Explosions spawn comic “SPLUT!” text bubbles. Environmental storytelling emerges in tiny loops: lifeboats launch out of broken windows in background layers; a piano slides across a flooded ballroom, smashing unseen.
Audio? AdLib angles: bassy slap-bass lines, faux steel drums, snare hits that sound like someone frying bacon. Alex Aldroyd and Neil Crossley duck in sudden trombone slides whenever a Dim Passenger belly-flops into acid. Critics called the soundtrack “circus-boat drowning” and meant it lovingly, its manic joviality slices constant panic.
Legacy and Influence
Amiga Power granted 84 % (“difficult yet delicious”), while PC Format 78 %, praising “anarchic cruise-ship mayhem.” But retail performance sputtered; Doom’s release that December commandeered shareware CD real estate, and floppy-driven cartoons looked 16-bit beside the first-person future. As a result, Sink or Swim never spawned a direct sequel.
Influence flows quietly. Lorne Lanning later cited “British rescue puzzlers” when conceptualising Abe’s frantic Mudokon herding in Oddworld. The binary also sneaks into speedrunning circles: a current any-percent record clocks 57 minutes, exploiting a collision quirk letting Kevin clip through a closed hatch if two Dim Passengers clip him simultaneously.
BBS culture kept the flood alive. Fans swapped custom level editor hacks (Ocean never published tools, but debug flags existed), sharing WAD-like files with labyrinthine valve mazes. One enterprising group, “Cruise Ctrl,” ported sprites into a Doom TC, letting players shotgun steam vents instead of timing valves, sacrilegious but hilarious.
Why niche? Marketing overshadow, sure, but also schizophrenic difficulty and a theme some labelled “too kiddie” for DOS die-hards. Yet for puzzle aficionados it remains a gem of physical logic, a 2-second buoyancy timer foreshadowing modern indie darlings like Spelunky or Super Mario Maker’s troll levels.
Closing Paragraph & Score
Loading Sink or Swim in 2025 feels like binge-watching vintage disaster flicks while solving mechanical keyboards: kitsch production values, legitimate pulse-spikes, and puzzle elegance buried under Day-Glo paint. The Buoyancy Clause still slays me, seeing an inflatable-ring tourist bob just long enough to spark hope, then gulp under because I mis-pulled a valve, is pure slapstick tragedy. Collision boxes may gaslight you, and the password strings can sever friendships, but the core loop, study the Rube-Goldberg screen, turn valves, wrestle conveyor belts, rescue the blob, holds up as tightly wound design.
On my retro report card, Kevin Codner earns a 7.9 / 10. Not the unsinkable titan of puzzle history, perhaps, yet bobbing proudly amid bigger boats like Lemmings and The Lost Vikings.