A Valley Without Wind



Something bad happened: reality shattered, and different places in different time, ranging from the bronze age to the Magitek-reliant ice age to the land when robots reign supreme now stand side by side. Overlords now rule the world, windstorms and monsters terrorize the survivors.

In this world called Environ, you control a glyphbearer, those who are granted power by Ilari to be able to safely venture out into the wilds not protected by Ilari's powers. Your job is to try to improve the world somehow, but don't expect this to be easy: life of glyphbearer is short, and death is not the matter of if, but when.

A Valley Without Wind is a Metroidvania-ish adventure game with elements of city-building game made by Arcen Games, the creator of AI War Fleet Command, but with the maps being procedurally generated instead of being fixed like most Metroidvania games. Your goal is to gather materials to improve your city and spell list, upgrading your characters, and take down overlord of each continent. Since death in this game is expected, you can change characters around with those in your city, or if you die, then you'll be given a replacement characters (without character upgrade), and the dead character will become vengeful ghost that can be fought.

The game has no end. When a continent is cleared, you can move on to the next.

The game also contains co-op mode, which you can join other people's world. -

This game provides examples of:

 * AI Is a Crapshoot: Averted, despite all the skelebots running around (including Giant Mook boss variants) nothing Ice Age natives say suggested they ever acted up before the Cataclysm. The playable skelebot NP Cs do tend to act superior, but from their perspective, humanity went extinct centuries ago.
 * Anachronism Stew: Starts off bad ("contemporary" time periods have bipedal mecha as a standard enemy) and gets progressively worse as the continent tier increases and enemies can roam further from their native habitat. Taken Up to Eleven in the "Fix Anachronism" missions which require you to eliminate enemies that don't belong in the environment, resulting in sea-snakes in a DESERT dungeon.
 * Apocalypse How
 * Bag of Spilling: Going to a new continent will keep all statistics and tools you have for the currently-used character, but spells are lost.
 * Convection Schmonvection: Averted, in terms of both heat and cold. An Ice Age area will freeze an unprepared character to death very quickly without help from monsters. Thawing Ice Age areas are a little more forgiving, but still sap health constantly. A Snowsuit protects against this, and even slowing frost, but is so heavy it usually disables jump-enhancing enchantments. The exceptions are Ice Age natives, who wear a custom Snowsuit by default that both protects from the cold and allows them to jump normally, and skelebots, being robots and all.

Similarly, in hot areas like Lava Flats or Lava Escape missions characters take a constant degree of damage and falling into lava means rapid incineration. A Heatsuit will negate the ambient damage and give you a couple second to get out of a lava pit, but is so heavy it disables special jumps. An Advanced Heatsuit slows lava damage down further and makes it easier to move around, and even resists cold, but still inhibits jumping. Draconians, being native to the lava flats, and skelebots are both naturally immune to ambient heat.
 * Crapsack World: Combined with Anachronism Stew and Patchwork Map.
 * Death From Above: The missions which involve protecting piles of supplies from meteor showers. Also pirate barges, which will constantly bombard any outdoor reigon in range.
 * Death Is a Slap On The Wrist: Well, not for the character - they bite the dust permanently and take their upgrades with them. Everything else transfers over to a new character along with the Glyph, though, so you're only a pile of upgrade stones away from where you were.
 * Double Unlock: Mysteries. First you have to meet their unlock conditions, then get lucky and find the room they're hidden in, then solve a puzzle to receive the precious scrap of backstory.
 * Endless Game: After you defeat the overlord on a continent, you move on to the next. The world is infinite in size, and so does the number of continents.
 * The End of the World As We Know It: Subverted in that after the Earthshattering Kaboom, the fragments of the planet were put back together
 * Humongous Mecha: Whenever the Skelebots appear as a boss.
 * Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Hints to what the heck has actually happened and what's going on now are found by solving "mysteries" scattered throughout the world.
 * Just One More Turn: The game is a HUGE time sink, with thoughts of "Okay, I'll just upgrade this one spell and stop" spiraling out of control when each spell component needs to be unlocked, with each unlock condition having prerequisites... The developer is completely aware of it, too. The button to confirm quitting the game is labeled "Yeah, I should probably go eat or sleep or something."
 * Magitek: Most people on the planet can use magic, and technology in the world, especially during the Ice Age, is powered by magic.
 * Metroidvania: The game has large elements of this.
 * New Game Plus / No Ending
 * Passing the Torch: Back and forth and can be done repeatedly. After all, there is only one glyph (or few in co-op mode), but many people.
 * Patchwork Map: Justified, since something really bad happened and now reality is shattered and is randomly patched back together.
 * Random Number God: Determines mission rewards, which can inhibit spell creation or settlement development if you're unlucky. Critical supplies and basic powers can be bought from the settlement, however; prices are exorbitant, but it provides an option if the RNG just hates you.
 * Replacement Mooks: Your characters.
 * Shout Out: Half of the Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels for the platforming difficulty are variants on I Wanna Be the Guy. Another one of them is a reference to Super Mario.
 * Super Drowning Skills: Well, not actually drowning, but since all water is acidic after the cataclysm the constant damage has the same effect. An Acid Gills enchantment inverts this to Super Not Drowning Skills.
 * Unwinnable By Design / Unwinnable By Mistake: Somewhere between the two. The developers have not programmed any unwinnable game states, however they note an intentional feature can cause one: a dead character creates a vengeful ghost. If your next character dies, there's two ghosts, and so on. Too many ghosts in a mandatory place (say, the Overlord's chamber) and you're stuck.
 * Wide Open Sandbox: You can go anywhere once the tutorial is over. You can even go straight to the Big Bad's lair right at the start of the game.