Coming to iOS and Android

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

Skyward is a climb. One tower, twenty five named places inside it, and a light rising underneath you that never slows down.

The story Support

Free to play. One hand, portrait, a level at a time.

Skyward key art: a small squire in oversized armour running toward a castle on a hill.

The premise

The light the kingdom was built on has come loose

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.

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.

Sera is at the summit. She is the reason the tower is still standing, and she is not going to say so.

There is no villain in any of this. Nothing hunts you, nothing fights you, and nothing dies but your own run. The rising light is a material, not a monster, and the whole horror of it is that it does not care.

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.

Tam, the climber

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.

Sera, the keeper

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, and you see the light of it long before you see the thing.

Ordwin, the keepwright

Fourth generation of the family who built the machine that held the light down. He is not sad the Keep is falling, he is annoyed, in the way of a man watching his own work fail exactly as he warned in writing. Everything you find on the way up came out of his workshop.

Wick, the lamp

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 all the talking, and it went up the stairs with Tam without being asked.

The journey

Five towers inside one building

The Keep was rebuilt by four generations of the same family, so the climb passes through four ideas about how to hold something down, and then leaves the building entirely.

FirstRoyal CourtThe Keep as people lived in it. Flagstones, bells, banners, candle racks. The last warm place in the game.
SecondVerdant TerraceThe gardens and the water engines, in green bronze. There is nothing underneath them any more.
ThirdCrystal SpiresThe glass the Keep was tuned with. Beautiful, precise, and it has stopped holding.
FourthStorm VaultThe binding machinery itself. Iron, lightning, parts the size of rooms, and it is losing.
FifthThe AetherNothing built at all. Above the roof there is no architecture, and the floor under you is the light agreeing to hold its shape.

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, and the rest of the climb is built on top of it.

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.

Screens

From the current build

Work in progress. Art, tuning and copy are all still moving.

The Keep, the game's home screen, with the castle on its cliff. — The Keep, where a climb starts.

The level map, listing Royal Court, Verdant Terrace and Crystal Spires. — Five places between here and her.

A climb in progress, with the rising aether below. — The light does not stop rising.

A climb through the Verdant Terrace. — Above the gardens, and still going.

Questions, or something that went wrong

One person reads these, and a note with the level number in it is worth ten without one.

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