A Lyran Saga
The homeworld is falling. The ships are loading. Between the rift and the beacon stands one thing: you.
Free. One download, and it plays on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
“I am no soldier. None of us are.”
Warden Sael · the first watch
The long retreat
The Draco tore a rift between the worlds and poured through it. There is no version of this war where Lyra is held.
So the campaign is not a war you win. It is a year of buying hours: twenty-one stands along the road to the evacuation fields, each one holding long enough for another ark to clear the ground. You are not defending a kingdom. You are defending a departure.
Every board is a painting with its own biome, its own landmark and its own way of turning against you. The mires slow the column. The rifts tear open mid-wave. The roads fork, cross and double back on themselves, and by the last field the enemy is converging from three of them at once.
The war codex
Twenty-one story levels across the falling homeworld, and The Long Watch — an endless mode where the only score that matters is how many more ships got away because you were still standing.
Eight tower families that upgrade into an elite form: arrow, frost, ember, mortar, venom, lance, banner and mender. Three families fork at the top, and the fork is a commitment — a Longbow becomes a Starshot Bastion or a Skypiercer, a Glacier an Aurora Spire or a Shatterfrost, a Mortar a Siege Bombard or a Cinderfall Battery. Never both.
Nineteen painted creeps drawn from four sub-races that never mix: the skarn swarms, the grey husks, the Draco elders and the Hollow that feed on light itself.
A fully procedural orchestral score, composed on the device as you play. It rises with the wave, thins when the line thins, and mourns the levels you lose.
The Journal is a war codex that fills as you meet what is in it: every tower, every creep, every doctrine, written down by a warden who never expected to need any of it. The Gallery keeps the paintings you have earned.
The board
One download
Not four ports of a phone game. One engine, cut for four machines and verified to run the same battle on each: the phone in your pocket, the iPad on the table, the Mac on your desk, and the television in the room where everyone else can watch the line break.
Progress rides your own iCloud account between your devices — levels cleared, records set, every entry the Journal has filled in. It merges rather than overwrites, which is the part save-sync usually gets wrong: a fastest clear set on the Mac and a no-loss run set on the phone both survive, and a device that has been in a drawer for a month contributes what it earned instead of being flattened by one that has not.
It is your iCloud, not a server of ours — and the whole game plays signed out of it.
Game Center keeps the record on every Apple platform: the stands held without losing a life, the clears made on the difficulty that takes your soul, the things you were never supposed to survive. Optional, signed in or not — the campaign does not notice either way.
Made to be fair
Every line above is true of the build that ships, not a promise about a future one. The full text is in the privacy policy.
Elsewhere in the saga
Generations after the road you are holding, one ark-colony left Vega and came down on a young world it could not leave again.
Its survivors scattered among humans who had no idea what had fallen into their hills — star-people going quiet, their resonance thinning with no song left to tune it to. Beneath the fields those humans farm are vaults cut long before them, and something sealed in the deepest of them has started to answer.
Starfall: A Lyran Saga is an 8-bit role-playing game set in the same universe, generations on: a top-down overworld that drops into first-person deeps, in the idiom of the cartridges that taught most of us what a party was.
In development. No date, no store page, and nothing to sign up for — this is only so you know the war has an after.
“And when the last horn sounds anyway, still be singing.”
The Crucible · the last stand