a first-person life in the stone age
battle royale · last one standing
A blizzard is eating the world. What is left of it is a circle, and the circle is getting smaller. Everyone is scattered across it with cold hands and whatever they can find on the ground.
Outside the ring the cold opens you the way an arrow does. There are no health bars out here either.
the long winter, against people
waiting
WASD move · Shift sprint · Ctrl crouch/sneak · Space jump
Look at a trunk + F climb a tree. On the trunk, W/S ascend or descend, A/D circle it, Space leap off, F let go.
Look at a hanging vine + Space to catch it. Swing with W/S, release with Space — your momentum carries.
Low ledges are mantled automatically when you jump into them.
E gather / interact · Mouse1 use held item · Mouse2 aim (bow & thrown)
1–6 select from your belt · Q drop · G sleep
C crafting · Tab your body & goods · M the map · T your tribe · J the chronicle
M opens the ground you are standing on, drawn from the same height field you walk over. Drag it about, roll the wheel to come closer or further off, R puts you back in the middle of it.
It fills itself in as you look at it, and remembers — the second time you open a stretch of country it is already there.
A battle royale, played with flint. Everyone starts scattered with nothing; a blizzard closes on a circle that shrinks and moves, and outside it the cold takes your blood the way an open artery does.
Hide bundles with a stake and a strip of ochre hide on them are the loot: a spear, a bow, arrows, bindings. E opens one. The white ring on the map is where the storm stops; the dashed one is where it is going.
Online plays the same match against people. One of you opens a room and reads the four-letter code out; everyone else types it in.
Make a campfire from sticks, stones and tinder. It marks where your camp is, it is the only place you can cook, and you light a torch off it before going underground.
E at the fire warms you through. G beside it sleeps you through to first light — you can only sleep once it is dark or you are genuinely worn out, and the world keeps moving while you are under.
Steep hillsides sometimes open into a hollow, and the hollow goes back into the rock. Take a lit torch: nothing else down there gives light, and there is nothing gentle at the bottom.
Caves hold flint seams, ochre, clay and old bone, and sometimes marks that somebody left on the wall a very long time before you.
There are no health bars. An arrow through the skull ends anyone — you included. A lung takes a minute. A thigh takes an hour and a lot of screaming.
Bind wounds with fibre before you bleed out. Watch your vision narrow — that is the only warning you get.
Every human has a name, a face, kin and a temper. Tribes trade, feud, split and die whether or not you are watching.
Feed an animal what it likes, often enough, and it may follow you. Feed a person and they may too.