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The Keep has fallen. The only way out is up.

Skyward is a climb. Twelve towers, three hundred levels, and a light rising underneath you that never slows down.

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300 levels
One hand

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The premise

The light the kingdom was built on has come loose

Morning
The aether was never safe. It was kept, and the Keep is what kept it. When it broke, it started coming up through the floors, and the ground stopped being somewhere you could go.
Midday
Tam was on the stairs when it happened. Not chosen, not summoned, just carrying something upstairs at the wrong moment. He kept going because down had stopped existing.
Afternoon
Sera is at the summit. She is the reason the tower is still standing, and she is not going to say so.
Evening
There is no villain in any of this. Nothing hunts you and nothing fights you. The rising light is a material, not a monster, and the whole horror of it is that it does not care.
Night
The Keep keeps your hours. Open the game in the morning and it is morning on the headland. Open it at ten at night and the windows are lit and the fireflies are out.

The Keep on its headland in the morning.

The cast

Four of them, and one never says a word

Nobody here is a hero by appointment. They are the people who happened to be in the building.

The climber

Tam

The Keep's youngest squire, small inside somebody else's armour. He carries an empty scabbard the whole way up, because there was never anything to fight. He never speaks. He is you.

The keeper

Sera

At the top, in working clothes, with no crown and nothing decorative about her. The only voice in the game. What she is holding stays out of frame for a hundred levels.

The keepwright

Ordwin

Fourth generation of the family who built the machine that held the light down. Not sad the Keep is falling, annoyed, the way a man is when his work fails exactly as he warned in writing.

The lamp

Wick

A brass hand-lamp Ordwin fed a drop of aether forty years ago, which has since declined to be a lamp. It has no face. The flame does the talking, and it went up the stairs without being asked.

The journey

Twelve towers. Two books.

Five places inside the Keep, then seven old beacons across the kingdom. Each one has its own stone, its own light, and its own way of getting in your way.

I · Levels 1 to 25
Royal Court
The Keep as people lived in it. Flagstones, bells, banners, candle racks. The last warm place in the game.
II · Levels 26 to 50
Verdant Terrace
The gardens and the water engines, in green bronze. There is nothing underneath them any more.
III · Levels 51 to 75
Crystal Spires
The glass the Keep was tuned with. Beautiful, precise, and it has stopped holding.
IV · Levels 76 to 100
Storm Vault
The binding machinery itself. Iron, lightning, parts the size of rooms, and it is losing.
V · Levels 101 to 125
The Aether
Nothing built at all. Above the roof, the floor under you is the light agreeing to hold its shape.
Book II · The seven beacons
The Keep was never the only one
Seven older towers held their share of the light, and one by one they went dark. Now it is rising inside them, and Wick is the only flame that can relight a beacon.
VI · Levels 126 to 150
Sunscorch Dunes
Sandstone, awnings and a clock tower in the desert. The first beacon, and the first climb with no liquid at all: a clock instead.
VII · Levels 151 to 175
Ember Forge
Where the Keep's iron was cast. The fires are still burning, with nobody left to tend them.
VIII · Levels 176 to 200
Rosewater Cloister
White marble, climbing roses and fountains. Sera's garden, from before all of this. The softest climb in the game.
IX · Levels 201 to 225
Gull Point
A lighthouse of weathered timber and whitewash. The sea under it breathes in and out.
X · Levels 226 to 250
Starfall Observatory
Slate, brass and a painted night sky. Where the beacons' timing was worked out, and lit only in places.
XI · Levels 251 to 275
Quicksilver Halls
Polished silver and mirror glass. Every tower you have climbed shows up somewhere in its reflections.
XII · Levels 276 to 300
The Dawn Crown
Back where it started. The Keep, cold and dark, climbed one last time as the sun comes up.

The turn

Halfway up, the climb stops meaning what it meant

Somewhere in the third tower you learn one thing, and everything before it reads differently afterwards. A line you were given in the first hour and almost certainly skipped turns out to have been an instruction.

We are not going to tell you here. It is the one thing in this game worth arriving at cold.

All of it is told in short cards between levels, narrated, and skippable in a single tap. Skip every one and you lose nothing but the story.

Fair by design

Nothing between you and the next floor

0
Ads
No banners, no videos, no "watch this to continue". The game never interrupts a climb to sell you something.
300
Levels
Two books, from the Muster Yard at the bottom of the Keep to the Dawn Crown at the end of it.
12
Towers
Each with its own stone, its own light, and its own trick: ice, springs, wind, sand, embers, lanterns.
1
Hand
Drag to run, tap to jump. Portrait, one thumb, on the bus or in bed.