The Long Balance
Take what the valley gives. Give it back, or your grandchildren inherit a ruin.
iPhone · iPad · Mac · Apple Vision Pro
Take what the valley gives. Give it back, or your grandchildren inherit a ruin.
iPhone · iPad · Mac · Apple Vision Pro
You arrive in a valley with nothing, and no one is coming. Each morning gives you a fixed number of hours, and the only question the game ever asks is what those hours buy.
Fire warms. Rain soaks. Hunger builds, and a wound left alone turns bad. Nothing is abstracted into a health bar: the cold is a real thermal budget, the larder is real food that really rots, and the ground remembers what you took out of it.
There is no score. Live long enough, and the place earns a name.
Twenty-seven seconds
Apple Vision Pro
On the headset the camp does not sit in a window. Say the word and it is in your room at waist height — a desert holding on a hard-baked pan, or a taiga camp with the birches turning — and you lean over the fire, look down the river, and walk round the house. The tabletop diorama is still there when you want it small.
The same life, the same save, on every device you own.
What the game is actually about
Every other survival game asks how fast you can strip a place. This one asks what is left when you are finished — because the valley answers back, on a delay long enough that you will have forgotten what you did.
Clear the slope of trees and you have a winter of firewood and a field. You have also taken away the sponge that held the rain. The next storm runs straight off the bare ground, strips the soil you meant to farm, and drops it as silt in the river. The silt fills the pool behind your dam and chokes the weir the fish run through. None of it is a scripted punishment. It is four systems doing what they honestly do, in the order they do it.
Build so the valley is richer for your being in it, not poorer. Every decision is weighed against the seventh generation — the people who will live here long after you are a name in the chronicle.
Nine valleys, and none of them forgives the same mistake
A boreal taiga, a Chihuahuan scrub, a rice-river valley, a high Andean shelf, the Sahel's edge, a Pacific rain coast, an Apennine hillside, a Baltic shore. Each carries its own weather, its own plants and its own beasts — and its own way of killing you. What you learn in one is half-wrong in the next.
The gold is a warning. The long dark and the deep cold are six weeks out, firewood stops being a chore and becomes the whole year's arithmetic — and the wolverine takes whatever you hang.
Bitter, and snowing. Nothing grows, nothing forages, and every day is spent against what the autumn put by. This is the same ground as the picture beside it, ninety days on.
Heat, an arroyo that is dry until it is lethal, and salt on the playa. Water is not a resource here. It is a daily problem with a deadline.
Monsoon, rice and a tiger. The wet comes on a schedule you can learn and cannot argue with, and the forest grows back faster than you can cut it — which is the only place in this game where that is true.
A wet season and a dry one, sorghum, and a lion. Water is not a resource here, it is a season you have to survive.
Five ways of looking at one valley
Twelve hours of light, drawn as an arc. Spend them down the list in the order you set, and live with it.
Everything you have built, standing where you put it. Fly up for the whole holding, or stand at your own fire and look around.
The same ground as a drawing. Contours, seep, sparks and wind — read the land before you spend a season on it.
Five ledgers and no health bar. Everyone has an age, a leaning, someone they walked in with, and somewhere to sleep.
A life, written as it was lived. Not a save file — a record, in the order the days actually fell.
An astrolabe cut for this valley's latitude. It shows only what your camp has earned — a bare limb at first.
From open sky to a measured house
Not a starter hut. Open ground, and a night coming. Pile branches into a debris hut and the ladder begins: mud into the weave, reed over it, stones at the foot. Every rung you raise is redrawn as a measured sheet — plan, section, elevation — so you can see exactly what you have built and what it is keeping out.
Day one. Open sky, nothing raised.
Later. Plan, section and elevation, drawn to scale.
The ages
Every craft in the game is a real one, in the order history actually found it. You cannot fire brick without a kiln, cannot melt copper without forced air, cannot force air without something to force it with.
A hundred and nine of them are STRUCTURES — things that stand on the ground and stay there. A fire pit, a drying rack, a smoke house, a well, a kiln, a byre, a wall, a gate, a forge. They are sited on the plan, they take damage, they are repaired and upgraded, and every one of them changes the arithmetic of a night.
Nothing unlocks on a timer. Things become possible because you made the thing before them.
Three rules the whole game obeys
The first of three
One valley is a long story, and it does not all belong in one game. Survive is the whole of it that a household can do alone: fire, food, a roof, the first winters, and the slow argument with the ground that decides whether your grandchildren inherit a place or a ruin. It is finished, and it is what you can buy.
The two that follow are planned, not promised — and each is a game, not an expansion pack.
Book One
Stone, clay and the homestead. One keeper, then a family, and everything a pair of hands can make from what a valley actually contains. Out now.
Book II
The hamlet and the village. Neighbours who did not choose you, roofs that are not yours, a road that brings strangers, and the things a settlement can make that no household can — because they need more hands than one house has.
Book III
Metal at scale, and the crafts that need a whole society standing behind them: people who do one thing all year, and a valley asked to carry far more than it ever has.
Play a whole season before you decide. If the valley keeps you, one purchase opens it for good — every winter, every life, on all your devices.
Own the Valley $9.99
One purchase. No subscription, no advertising, nothing to buy twice.
The beta is by invitation, fifty seats at a time. iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro. Free while it is in beta.