Valley 1:Permadeath: It Means Give Your Health Bar The Respect It Deserves

So... permadeath. Yeah, that's a loaded word. Whenever most people hear that word, they think of uber-hardcore roguelike games. But you'll notice that, in our What Genre Is This, Anyway? page, we don't list roguelike among the primary genre inspirations for this game.

There are a lot of ways permadeath can be implemented in a game, and a lot of them are... well, frankly they are punitive. Our goal with permadeath in this game is not to make it something that punishes you-the-player, but rather to make it an unfortunate event that happens to your character. And thus part of the story you are weaving through your actions.

Here's How Our Implementation Of Permadeath Actually Works

1. When a character dies, that character is dead for good.

2. The world is a pretty brutal place. During the cataclysm that shattered reality, most of the people didn't survive. Those consciousness shards that you're picking up all over the place? Yeah, those are bits of the minds of people that didn't make it through the cataclysm.

3. Still on the whole brutality thing: whenever somebody dies away from the protection of the Ilari (aka, pretty much anywhere outside of town or the tutorial), a vengeful ghost of that person comes back to haunt you. We said death was permanent, not that an evil shade of yourself wouldn't come back to half-life to prey on the living.