Elysian Realms

The game you finish is not the game you started

Most tower defense games have an easy mode and a hard mode: the same board, bigger numbers. Hold a realm here and you do not unlock a harder version of it. You unlock a different one.

Defend. The realm as it stands. One road, one keep, and whatever you can afford to put beside it.

Defend Harder. Not the same run with the numbers turned up. A generation has passed: the smiths have built the first Aura Orb, and the Onslaught has spent those same years getting ready.

The Cataclysm. The realm ending. Strikes fall out of the sky and aim at your towers, and the sea comes in on a meter you can slow but never stop. Every realm's theme was re-recorded for its own unmaking.

Seven realms, and each one changes a rule

• One splits the road and makes you hold both halves.

• One puts half the battlefield in the dark — you build for what you cannot see.

• One pays for every stroke of good luck with the next one.

• One sends a boss down the road every tenth wave, with an escort.

None of them is a reskin. Two of the seven are not reached by finishing the realm before them. They are earned.

Losing is the mechanic, not the failure

Every run banks its XP, won or lost, into a skill tree that carries to the next one. The tree keeps going forty ranks past every node's printed maximum — and when you have finally filled the whole thing, you can trade it for a Crest and grow it again, stronger. Getting a little further each time is the game.

Ninety-six skill nodes across seven boughs. Sixteen Crown Boons. A hundred and forty-nine deeds. A tree that costs over forty million XP to fill once.

A nine-year-old can play it. An adult cannot exhaust it.

Short sentences, no jargon, and a first run that teaches itself. Thirteen colour themes, rebindable keys, and a Calm Mode that stops every moving thing at once.

It runs on your machine and nowhere else

No account. No sign-in. No advertising, no analytics, no telemetry. The game opens no network connection of its own — Steam carries your save between your computers, and nothing else leaves the machine. Bought once, and yours.

Made at home

A family home-education project that snowballed into something far grander than the sum of its parts. No publisher, no outsourced art, no licensed assets. Forty-nine pieces of music, written and recorded for this game. Every sprite drawn for it.