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.
Apple Vision Pro
The whole holding sits in the room as a diorama you can lean into, turn on its axis and walk around — the fire alight, the river running, the smoke leaning with the wind.
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 long dark and the deep cold. Firewood is not a chore here, it is the whole year's arithmetic — and the wolverine takes what you hang.
Rain, cedar, and salmon that run on the calendar's own schedule. Nothing dries unless you make it dry.
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.
Nothing unlocks on a timer. Things become possible because you made the thing before them.
Three rules the whole game obeys
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.