Paint the plaza. INKWAVE is a 3D turf-war shooter in which two teams of four fight to cover the most ground in ink before the clock (90 seconds or 3 minutes) runs out, and you play one of the four on your team, with three bot teammates against four bot opponents. You spray ink to claim floor, walls and crates, turn into a squid to swim and climb through your own colour, and splat opponents; enemy ink slows you down and hurts, so you swim or paint over it. Four main weapons (a rapid Spritzer, a Swell Roller, a charged Glint Charger and a Popper Blaster), a Splat Bomb and two specials are available, on three maps and three bot difficulties. It is in the style of Nintendo's Splatoon, and the person who posted it on X calls it a Splatoon game; it is not affiliated with Nintendo. There is no author's name in the game or on its page; the poster on X says Opus 5.5 made it.
INKWAVE: Turf Riot (the page title reads "INKWAVE — Turf Riot") is a 3D team shooter about painting the ground. Two teams of four spray coloured ink over a small city plaza, and when the clock runs out the team that has covered more of the floor wins. You are one of the eight players; your three teammates and the four opponents are all bots, and the menu says as much: "Jump into a 4 v 4 Turf War against bots". There is no online play and no account. Your settings are kept in your browser.
Its central idea is that ink is both your weapon and your road. Hold Shift and you turn into a squid, which swims fast through ink of your own colour, refills your tank while you do it, and can climb a wall that has been painted your colour. Enemy ink does the opposite: it slows you and hurts. So a match is a mix of shooting, painting over the other team's work, and choosing when to dive. It plays a lot like Nintendo's Splatoon, and the person who posted the game on X calls it "Splatoon Game". This page says so plainly. INKWAVE is not made or endorsed by Nintendo, and its own Credits page describes it as "an original 4 v 4 turf-war shooter".
Who made it, and how, is the reason this page is careful. Nothing in the game or on its page names an author: there is no README, no licence and no repository link (we checked, and the usual paths return 404), and the Credits page thanks only three.js and two fonts. The way we found it is a post on X by Jayden Davis (@JaydenDavisNC) on 25 September 2026, which reads "Splatoon Game made by Opus 5.5", with a gameplay video and the link, and which had about 170,000 views when we read it. We read that post ourselves in a browser; we did not watch the video. So "made with Claude Opus 5.5" here is the poster's own statement, on a page that does not itself say so, and we cannot tell you how the game was actually built or that the poster is its only author. We did not find a public repository for it. The game's code is split into 43 modules of plain JavaScript on top of a bundled copy of three.js (r186), which is normal for a project of this size and is not evidence of how it was written.
How to play INKWAVE: Turf Riot
- Open it and wait for the loading bar; the first time it fetches about 4.4 MB and can sit on the bar for several seconds before it says to press any key. The menu has Play, Loadout, Settings, How to Play and Credits. Play opens a setup screen where you choose the map (Tidewater Plaza by day, Kelpline Terminal, a container yard, or Tidewater at dusk), the bots' difficulty (Chill, Fresh or Fierce) and the match length (90 seconds or 3 minutes).
- Move with W A S D and aim with the mouse; the game locks the pointer, and Esc pauses and releases it. Left mouse fires your main weapon. Hold Shift to swim as a squid in your own ink and press Space to jump. Hold the right mouse button or E to aim your sub-weapon, a Splat Bomb, and let go to throw it; F or Q fires your special (Tidal Slam, a jump and ground pound, or Ink Tempest, a rain cloud). Hold Tab for the map and use it or the keys 1 to 4 to Super Jump to a teammate or your base.
- Loadout lets you pick a main weapon: the Spritzer (fast shots), the Swell Roller (a paint roller), the Glint Charger (a charged long shot) and the Popper Blaster (an explosive shot). Painting is the point, so paint behind you as you go, take back ground the other team has covered, and dive into your own ink to refill instead of standing still. At the end a results screen shows each team's share of the map as a bar and a podium, and gives experience points and a level.
- The game has five team colour pairs and a colour-blind palette, and its code defines four graphics levels (Low, Medium, High, Ultra), which we did not try. If it runs badly on your machine, look for the graphics setting first. On a phone it will load, but there are no touch controls, so play it on a computer.
Controls: W A S D move and the mouse aims (the game locks the pointer). Left mouse fires. Hold Shift to turn into a squid and swim through ink of your own colour (faster, and it refills your ink tank); Space jumps. Hold the right mouse button or E to aim the sub-weapon and let go to throw it; F or Q fires your special. Hold Tab for the map, and use the map or the number keys 1 to 4 to Super Jump to a teammate or your base. Esc pauses. The pause menu has Resume, Settings, How to Play and Quit Match. The game also lists gamepad controls; we did not test them.
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
Nothing is downloaded from another site. The whole game is the page, 43 script files, a bundled three.js, two fonts (Titan One and Rubik, both credited on the Credits page as under the SIL Open Font Licence) and lightmap pictures for the maps, under 5 MB in all. There are no model, texture or sound files: the Credits page says the models, textures, music and sound effects are all generated by code. We did not hear the sound, because we ran it muted.
It is a heavy page for how small it is. In Chromium with a real graphics chip at 1280 by 800 on the highest quality setting we measured about 24 to 32 frames a second in a match, so it is worth trying a lower setting on an older machine. Across several matches, including in an emulated phone, we saw no script errors and no console errors. Our test player was driven by a script that supplied the pointer lock and mouse movement, because an automated browser cannot capture the real pointer; the game itself was not changed. The bots moved, painted and splatted each other, our own painting counted, and a 90-second match ended on a results screen (in one, Mint 40.7 percent against Bubblegum 23.9 percent).
Play runs our own copy of the page, so it keeps working if the original address stops responding. We changed one thing in it: the game asks for each map's baked-lighting picture with a cache-busting suffix ("?h=" and a code) that a static copy cannot answer, so we removed the suffix from that one address and saved the two pictures under their plain names. Nothing else in the game was edited. The original stays linked from this page, and if the author or a rights holder wants the copy removed, the contact in the footer gets it done.
How it was made and where it lives
Hosted on Vercel. Original: https://inkwave-six.vercel.app/. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
If you like INKWAVE: Turf Riot, try these
For another game whose poster credits Claude Opus 5.5 and which runs in 3D in the browser, see the Claude Opus 5.5 games list.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this Splatoon?
- No. It is a separate game in the same style: two teams paint the floor, you swim through your own ink as a squid, and the team with more ground wins. Splatoon belongs to Nintendo and this is not affiliated with it. The game's Credits page calls it an original game.
- Is it free, and can I play against other people?
- It is free, with no account and nothing to install. It is single-player only: you and three bot teammates play four bot opponents. We found no multiplayer and no server.
- Does it work on a phone?
- It loads, and a match starts, but there are no touch controls, so you cannot move or fire. Play it on a computer with a keyboard and mouse. The game also lists gamepad controls, which we did not test.
- How long is a match?
- You choose 90 seconds or 3 minutes on the setup screen, and the team with more of the map covered wins.
- Who made it, and was it made with Claude Opus 5.5?
- The game does not name its author. It reached us through an X post by Jayden Davis (@JaydenDavisNC) on 25 September 2026 that says it was made by Opus 5.5. That is the only source for the claim, and we could not check it against the game or a repository. We tagged the game with it and say here where it comes from.
- Why is it slow on my computer?
- It is a 3D game with real-time lighting and a lot of ink to draw. We measured about 24 to 32 frames a second on the highest setting in our test. Try a lower graphics level; we did not test the lower ones.
- Is INKWAVE: Turf Riot free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed INKWAVE: Turf Riot on your site
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