Bottleneck is a serious browser game that puts you in charge of the Strait of Hormuz crisis

At a glance:

• Bottleneck is a free, browser-based simulation game that places players in the role of the Strait of Hormuz's maritime coordinator during a hypothetical 10-day closure, managing a backlog of 2000 ships with no way to truly "win."
• Created by Polish journalist Jakub Górnicki, the game weaves real-world journalism into its mechanics—its news feed is populated with actual articles, and clicking on in-game factions opens real-life dossiers.
• Players must make impossible trade-offs between oil supply, humanitarian aid, geopolitical tensions, and an ever-rising escalation meter, all while Iran charges a $2 million per-ship toll and mines threaten the waterway.

What Bottleneck is and how it works

It was only a matter of time before someone turned the Strait of Hormuz into a game. The waterway has spent recent months locked in a kind of geopolitical quantum superposition—simultaneously open and closed, its status shifting with every diplomatic outburst and military maneuver. Bottleneck, a free browser-based simulation, is the most in-depth attempt yet to capture that tension in interactive form.

Bottleneck is not the first Hormuz-themed game. Sweep the Strait, a Minesweeper clone played on a Strait-shaped board, appeared within weeks of the first attacks on Iran in late February, and the lineage of ripped-from-the-headlines games stretches back to classics like GETSADAM. But Bottleneck distinguishes itself with depth and tone. This is not a novelty distraction. It is a serious, deliberately weighty experience that treats its subject matter with the gravity the real crisis demands.

The impossible decisions players must make

At the start of a hypothetical 10-day closure, 2000 ships are backed up and waiting for passage through the strait. Only a handful can run the gauntlet from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman each day, and the player decides which ones go. Each day presents a roster of candidates with details on cargo, capacity, destination, and wait time, along with an analysis of the consequences of authorizing passage.

The dilemmas are immediate and brutal. Letting an oil tanker through might ease global crude prices and improve relations with the United States, but it could also mean a ship carrying food to India waits another day—raising the specter of famine and drawing condemnation from the United Nations. As the game progresses, additional complications pile on: mines appear in the strait and clearing them is far from trivial, ships carrying perishable cargo become humanitarian disasters if left waiting too long, and someone must find the funds to pay Iran's steep per-ship toll. Meanwhile, Washington and Tehran trade insults on a live "Escalation" meter that ticks upward with every passing crisis.

The real-world journalism engine behind the game

What sets Bottleneck apart from a pure strategy exercise is its deep integration of real journalism. The in-game news feed is populated with actual articles covering the US–Iran conflict and its consequences. Clicking on one of the stakeholder factions in the game opens a dossier of real-life information, grounding every in-game abstraction in documented reality.

This is no accident. The game's creator is Jakub Górnicki, a Polish reporter whose work has taken him to conflict and crisis zones including Ukraine, Rojava, and the US–Mexico border. In a blog post about the project, Górnicki wrote: "The point [of Bottleneck] is not to win. The point is to understand what kind of problem this is, and why the word 'chokepoint' is not just a metaphor. It is a physical condition with political, economic, and human consequences."

A journalist's case for new containers for reporting

Górnicki's blog post goes further than explaining a single game—it lays out a broader philosophy about the future of journalism. He describes Bottleneck as part of a larger mission to find new "containers" for reporting. "What other containers can reporting live inside?" he writes. "Sometimes the answer is a stage. Sometimes it is an exhibition. Sometimes it is a wall in the city. This time it is a browser game."

The idea is that traditional article formats may not be the best vehicle for conveying the full complexity of certain stories—especially ones defined by systemic interdependencies, like a global shipping chokepoint under military threat. An interactive simulation, Górnicki argues, can communicate not just the facts of a crisis but the texture of decision-making within it: the trade-offs, the cascading consequences, and the dawning realization that there may be no good options left.

How Bottleneck fits into the tradition of serious games

Players and reviewers have naturally drawn comparisons to Frostpunk, the city-survival game set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter where the best outcome is simply making the least terrible choices. The tonal resemblance is unmistakable—both games place the player in a role where success is measured in damage limitation, not victory.

But there is a crucial difference. Frostpunk's frozen wasteland is fictional. The Strait of Hormuz is not. Bottleneck's power lies in the fact that every dilemma it presents has a real-world analogue, every consequence echoes an actual risk. That grounding transforms the experience from escapist strategy into something closer to interactive reportage—a playable argument that the world should be paying closer attention to a narrow strip of water through which a significant share of global energy flows.