A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2

Valley 2: Key Features

Procedural Contra-like with strategy layer.

Platforming and Turn-Based Strategy Coupled Together:
Flip back and forth between your own adventure, and the progress of the resistance you’re in charge of. Freely adjust difficulty levels for both to tailor the experience to your own personal playstyle. Both sides of the game can be quite easy or incredibly hard.

More Tactile Combat:
The physics of movement and attacks have been completely redone from the first title, with more traditional gamepad and keyboard support. Spells have mass and can block each other, leading to many interesting tactical situations in the platforming segments.

Vastly Improved Visuals:
Fully redone artwork by Heavy Cat Studios, including 125 all-new monsters, 200 spells, and lots more.

Focused Gameplay Arc:
Unlike the endless sandbox-style first game, this complete re-imagining has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

Procedurally Generated Worlds:
Each world is a unique challenge, leading to excellent replay value once you do beat the game!

Co-Op Multiplayer:
Bring along as many friends as you like on your journey, depending on your connection speed. 2-8 players recommended on most Internet connections; many more on LAN.

See Just How Deep An Arcen-style Rabbit-Hole Goes:
After dozens of hours you still haven’t seen it all: 50 mage classes in 5 tiers, 200 spells, 125 enemies, 14 biomes, 100+ types of world map tiles, 64 character customization perks, 100ks of procedural equipment possibilities.

Extra Challenges For Expert Players:
String together flawless kills to earn “concentration” and become even stronger. Beat the game on harder difficulties to earn rare achievements.

Get The Original Game For Free!
The original game was unique and experimental, and it comes included absolutely free when you buy the sequel.

Valley 2: A Procedural Contra-like with a Strategy layer

A modern take on the 16-bit era, A Valley Without Wind 2 blends a variety of mechanics across multiple genres, seamlessly bringing together the best qualities of old-school platform-shooters and turn-based strategy games. You choose how and where to explore via the world map, how to upgrade your character via mage classes, feats, and perks that you unlock, and how to battle the forces of evil every step of the way.Your character is a mage who has infiltrated the inner circle of the evil Demonaica, and you now share the power of immortality that he uses to terrorize the land. Using this power against him, it’s time to lead an uprising and ultimately bring him and his henchmen back to mortality so that they can be dispatched.Gameplay alternates between two modes that complement each other: brief, tightly-designed platorming segments where your character customization and equipment can be tuned to meet the tactical needs of the current stage; and quick strategic turns on the world map where you order your troops to fight, scavenge, build, recruit, farm, and use special powers. Demonaica and his armies pursue your forces directly on the world map, while his five henchmen have been sent to recapture you in the platforming segments.Your immortality came at great personal cost, but it makes you the one last hope of saving the world from darkness.

Valley 2: Reviews

It’s a minor miracle that Arcen Games could revise Valley Without Wind 1 so completely without simply upgrading it, that they have instead made a completely separate game that plays so differently and creates a unique type of experience based on getting your ass kicked.
– Tom Chick. Quarter To Three

Its unconventional and addictive blend of classic platforming action and basic strategy segments makes every accomplishment more meaningful and every failure more devastating, and the very real possibility that you will fail to vanquish Demonaica raises the stakes enough to make everything more interesting still.
– Jason Venter, GameSpot

Valley 1: Key Features

Procedural Metroidvania with crafting.

Travel alone or with friends across an ever-expanding world of dangerous creatures, powerful magic, high technology, and mysteries.
You have choice. The world of Environ is procedurally generated, and lets you go anywhere you see — including right into the overlord’s keep at any time. (Good luck with that.)
Environ is endless. When you save one continent from an overlord, a larger and more complex continent appears.
The game adapts to how you play: as you demonstrate your proficiency, monsters and missions upgrade accordingly. Killed 100 bats? Okay, time for… bats on fire!
Crazy amounts of character customization. Combine a multitude of spells, enchants, and equipment to create specialized character builds.
Play as a long line of brave adventurers. It’s not a question of IF your character is going to die, but WHEN. Any character that dies is permanently lost, but you keep all your inventory, enchants, and general progress in the game.
Become a community leader. Rescue NPCs for your settlement, construct buildings for them, and improve their skill and mood — then send them on dispatch missions to help you in return!
Be a clever problem-solver. Challenges have more than one solution, each with its own pros and cons. You get to figure things out rather than just jumping through a set of hoops.
Difficulty levels give exactly the challenge you want, from casual to hardcore on platforming, combat, and citybuilding independently.
Get The Sequel Free! The sequel is free for all customers who bought Valley 1!

Valley 1: A Procedural Metroidvania with crafting

A 2D sidescroller without a linear path. An action game with tactical combat and citybuilding. An adventure game that lets you free-roam a vast, procedurally-generated world. A Valley Without Wind defies genre stereotypes. Unlike other procedurally-generated games, you also get a logical progression in difficulty, plus helpful tips and checklists to guide your travels (should you need them).

Choose for yourself how to prepare to face the vastly stronger Overlord. Complete a variety of missions to earn new spells, and/or roam the wilds to uncover secret missions and stashes of magical crafting loot. Customize your characters with unique combinations of enchants and spells that change how you move, jump, and fight. Or rescue people and bring them back to your settlement so that they can then be sent on dispatch missions; you don’t have to carry the burden of your fledgling civilization alone!

You choose how to play, and the world adapts around you.

Valley 1: Reviews

Every thought of “I’ll just give it five more minutes” turned into, “Wait, where did that last hour go?”
– Kate Cox, Kotaku

I can imagine this game opening up under continued exploration to be one of those all-encompassing experiences that you can’t help sinking an unhealthy tract of time into.
– Jim Rossignol, Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A Valley Without Wind might be the place you’re looking for if you need to escape the same dreary titles.
– Rob Manuel, G4TV

A Valley Without Wind is a pure-brew indie game – it’s tonally retro, it’s antagonistic in its determination to be different and challenging in the extreme. It’s a bottomless pit of potential, just waiting for the mind-boggled to stumble their way in.
– Will Porter, Hookshot Inc.

As someone who usually avoids both platform games and action RPGs, the fact that I’ve spend a significant amount of time playing the beta of A Valley Without Wind should speak volumes of its unique blend, and the importance of procedurally generated content for unpredictability. It is a monstrous game with features you usually don’t see combined, but as you ease into the mechanics, A Valley Without Wind delivers a great mixture of platforming, role playing, and strategy.
– James Allen, Out of Eight

This indie title is imbued with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.
– Dan Crabtree, ars technica

But really, at the heart of what A Valley Without Wind is about, at least for me, is exploration and it does it phenomenally.
– Geoff Gibson, DIYGamer

The thing that struck me first about A Valley Without Wind is that it is absolutely vast. This is a game that you can sink hours and hours into, and still feel as though you’ve only started.
– Amy Nelson, Brutal Gamer

Several times a day they’ve got new updates, and it’s not just one or two things… Half the time I’m even messing with the game, I’m actually reading everything that’s changed…and there’s so much they’re planning to put in, there’s so much they’re tweaking. It’s really interesting to be in at the ground floor.
– Quick Save Podcast

This game has enough promise to fill the entire internet.
– Tom Auxier, Nightmare Mode

The multi-faceted gameplay elements are all somewhat familiar on their own, but the genres have never been blended like they have here.
– Anthony Karge, Try Indie

A Valley Without Wind delivers a very addicting experience which is sure to capture the gaming industry by surprise. It might not be perfect, but it sure as [heck] belongs on some of the best titles to be released this year on PC, consoles or anywhere. It’s just that good.
– Smoothtown

When the player asks, “Where do I go?” Games like A Valley Without Wind respond by saying “Anywhere.”
– Max Mallory, GameZombie.tv

Those looking for a challenging scroller…and endless gameplay have found their game.
– Tym Kaywork, Platform Nation

If you like games that will constantly surprise you, games that aren’t cookie cutter and hearken back to yesteryear, A Valley Without Wind is your escape.
– Dustin Orgill, Digital Hippos

I’ve chosen my character. I’m standing in a desolate and destroyed future. The world has been pieced together as best it can, though things just aren’t right: strange robots and monsters meld with a decidedly fantasy setting. Retro music swells up with an infectious beat. My first action is to jump. Nostalgic memories come flooding back. It feels so good.
– Jamie Dalzell, Games On Net

AVWW has a surprising amount of tactical depth in its combat… It’s much more involving than simply firing a spell at an enemy, and creates yet another wrinkle to AVWW’s already heavily nuanced gameplay.
– Zach Martin, PikiGeek

A Valley without Wind by Arcen Games is what happens when you try to make a Super Nintendo game today. A super polished limitless 2D metroidVania adventure game.
– Nick Bristow, Thrifty Nerd

Crucially, though, A Valley Without Wind is challenging without being punishing. It features what Arcen Games are calling “permadeath but not perma-[doomed].”
– Patrick Lindsey, Beefjack

There is no digging to move forward either. The world is yours to explore and deal with as you wish and it gives you plenty of options on how to achieve your goal
– KingIsaacLinksr

It was really great finding out about this game…because it’s one that defies genre typing, and really is something to see for oneself. You just might be surprised, especially if you’re a huge strategy fan, and that’s a good thing.
– Christina Gonzalez, RTSGuru

A Valley Without Wind is one of the most unique platformers I’ve ever played… The developer, Arcen Games, has custom plucked some of the best mechanics that have arose in the last decade and created an end product that is as much fun to play as it is to look at – and believe me, AVVW’s painterly aesthetic can be downright gorgeous
– Christopher Coke, Vagary.tv

I can’t explain why this game is fun, only that it’s fun.
– Alex Ward, Armless Octopus

The first thing that impressed me about AVWW was the soundtrack… While music is rarely a large part of what makes a game, AVWW gets an outstanding in this department.
– Alasdair Preston, DarkZero

Besides containing one of the best titles in recent memory, Arcen Game’s A Valley Without Wind is, perhaps, one of the most ambitious titles I’ve ever played.
– Andrew Whipple III, Gamer’s Guide to Life

It’s good. Really good. Not good-for-an-indie-title good; I mean good like candidate for game-of-the-year good. Like, this is good enough to stand up to any AAA title that has or will come out this year.
– Bill Whorton, Indie Game Reviewer

The throwback graphics and music are really a treat for old-school gamers; I often had the tunes stuck in my head long after exiting the game.
– Brandon Schmidt, The Indie Mine

As you get deeper into the game, it becomes more than a platformer.
– Michelle Ealey, Groovy Gamer

If there was one word to describe this amazing game of A Valley Without Wind, it would be “everything”. The game is so many things at once.
– Gaming in Public

I found myself getting more and more intrigued as I spent time with this game.
– The Whitest of Rice

AVWW pulled me in from the beginning and hasn’t let go. I can’t remember the last time I was so caught up in a virtual environment.
– Jeff Ortloff, Just Press Start

A Valley Without Wind is one of the most unique games I have ever played. It’s ability to combine excellent navigation and combat coupled with unrivaled levels of exploration in a 2D environment make it incredibly entertaining and a spectacle to behold.
– Gideon Kane, Bag of Games

If it’s this intriguing now, I can’t wait to see what the game looks like in a few months or years.
– Pete Davison, I’m Not Doctor Who

A Valley Without Wind is unprecedented. Unbelievable. Inexplicable, even… Genres seemingly meant nothing to Arcen Games, and with free rein to experiment, the creators of AI War have crafted something rather wonderful.
– Jonathan Lester, DealSpwn

I went into A Valley Without Wind expecting to find a throwback to the old days of 16-bit era side-scrollers. I wound up with something much more than that. Arcen Games has crafted an immersive action game that mashes up several elements of other genres.
– Ozzie Mejia, Indie Games Channel

The custom art style and visual effects are well polished, and Valley looks fantastic even on low-end machines.
– Briley Kenney, The Tech Labs

On the whole, it’s an amazing, genre-blending, noticeably polished game that is quite likely to suck up hours of your time.
– Play This Thing

It’s a project whose ambition is clear and a game which offers an awful lot of scope for playing ‘your way’.
– Peter Parrish, incgamers

After twelve hours of play – a time in which I could have played out most other modern games at least twice – I barely scratched the surface of what this game has to offer in terms of content.
– Adam Ames, True PC Gaming

A Valley Without Wind Wiki: Learning The Game

Getting Started Guide

What Are All These Maps For?

Frequently Asked Questions

Multiplayer Co-Op: Differences From Solo Play, And Other Notes

Valley 1 Demo (Unlockable Into Full Game With CD Key)

This zip archive contains the OSX, Windows, and Linux versions all in one package. More than 99% of the files are the same between all three operating systems, so this gives you the flexibility of having all three operating systems in one package without needing to download multiple large archives. To play the demo, simply unzip the archive into the location of your choice.

To run the game:
1. Windows: Run AVWW.exe (this is 32bit)
2. OSX: Run AVWW.app (this will run as 32bit or 64bit, depending on your OS).
3. Linux: Run AVWWLinux.x86 if you are on a 32bit OS, or AVWWLinux.x86_64 if you are on a 64bit OS.

That’s it! Note: if you have a CD key (NOT a steam key) for the game, then you can unlock this demo into the full version of the game.

Valley 2 Demo (Unlockable Into Full Game With CD Key)

To run the game:
1. Windows: Run Valley2.exe (this is 32bit)
2. OSX: Run Valley2.app (this will run as 32bit or 64bit, depending on your OS).
3. Linux: Run Valley2Linux.x86 if you are on a 32bit OS, or Valley2Linux.x86_64 if you are on a 64bit OS.

That’s it! Note: if you have a CD key (NOT a steam key) for the game, then you can unlock this demo into the full version of the game.

Important! When you buy the game, you actually get both games for the price of one. All pre-existing customers of AVWW1 get Valley 2 for free, and all future customers of Valley 2 get AVWW1 as a bonus.
If you already have Valley 1, just use your existing license key to unlock Valley 2!

System Requirements For Valley 1 and 2

COMPATIBLE OPERATING SYSTEMS
—————————-
Windows XP SP2 or later
Mac OSX Intel CPU and “Snow Leopard” 10.6 or later
Ubuntu 10.10 or later, although other unsupported distros may very well work

HARDWARE
——–
2 GB RAM
1.6Ghz CPU
300 MB Hard Disk Space
Screen resolution at least 720px high, and 1024px wide.