About us

The story behind Beyond the Horizon

Have you ever had the feeling that someone has been here before? Civilisations rise, flourish and disappear, and one belief survives them all: that something greater is watching over us. Different peoples gave it different names, faces and stories. But what if they were all looking at the same thing?

The false Gods

The beings humanity called Gods are not creators. They are old minds that arose with consciousness itself and found early humanity. They learned that belief has power: worship, fear and obsession make a resonance, and they feed on it. So through history they became whatever each people needed them to be. Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian: different civilisations meeting different faces of the same phenomenon. And the Gods need humanity alive, not out of love, but because without humanity there is nothing to feed on.

Then the craft come

At first they are the rarest of sights: a light over the ocean, a ship that is never seen again, something lifted out of the sea, a figure watching from a cliff. The game never tells you what you are looking at. Over time the visitors are seen more often, and each people behaves differently: the Tall Ones, the Collectors, the Observers and the Warren. Some watch, some take, some talk, and some seem strangely set on humanity surviving.

The Seven Ages

This is not humanity's first great civilisation. It is the seventh. Six came before, and each one ended. Cities lie under the sea, ancient roads under the rock, and things lie where they should not be. Each time the world came back a little smaller: more flooded, more broken, more forgotten. The Gods tell you that this age, the Age of Sail, was chosen because it is the easiest to keep. They are not telling you everything.

Who ended them?

Sometimes the Gods. Sometimes humanity itself. Sometimes nobody stopped it when they could have. Sometimes someone else interfered. There is no simple good aliens versus evil Gods here: every power has its own reason to want humanity to survive, or to disappear.

The sixth civilisation

The age before ours reached railways, aircraft, satellites, the bomb and an artificial mind: our own modern world. The sea begins to give it back: roads, machines, a computer inside an ancient city, traces of radiation, a nuclear facility under the waves. Its people are remembered in legend as giants, angels and sky-people. Then the records speak of war, and of an ending nobody could stop.

The visitors know what happened. Some of them were there.

Level 200: the truth opens

For two hundred levels the captain gathers scattered mysteries. At the end of the first great voyage they connect: the Seven Ages, the Gods, the craft, the drowned cities, the salvage, the floods. You are not the first. And at the top of the world stands Truth's Gate, a door in the ice that opens only for a captain who brings seven legends and one friend.

Beyond the Gate

Beyond the ice lies a hidden world between the sea and the sky, and the four peoples who live there. Each has its own history, culture, enemies and version of the truth, and none of them knows all of it. You stop fighting them and start understanding them, and every choice costs you somewhere else. Some want humanity protected, some want it gone, some want its technology, some want revenge on the Gods, and some only want to avoid another war.

The aliens have found a weakness. The violence of nuclear fire disrupts the resonance through which the Gods touch matter and minds, and the dead zones of the last war became places even the Gods fear to enter. It is why, after the sixth age fell, the world could not simply be rebuilt.

The man who survived

Long before you understand who he was, you hear the names: Z, then Space-Z, then Star-Blink, then StarSailor. And at last a man: Devon Rust, the richest human being of the sixth civilisation, whose satellites ringed the world and made it visible to whatever was listening. The beings ancient humanity called the Anunnaki answered. They were not gods either.

They warned him that something catastrophic was coming. He let them believe he wanted to help, and he stole from them: their knowledge of consciousness, of energy, of how a mind goes on after the body dies. He became immortal. Not a god, not an alien, not a machine: a man who had learned how to go on. Before the end he built StarSailor, a ship to carry a chosen few beyond the Earth, to a summit of alien powers on Series-X where humanity's fate was argued over. And he broke the shield that had kept humanity contained, and everything outside got in.

And further still

Past the wastelands lies the Binary Sea, a machine civilisation, an intelligence that was told to understand everything, and Devon Rust's greatest project: the Universal Model. The player should always know less than the world. NPCs disagree, aliens contradict each other, Gods lie, and some mysteries stay unanswered, until one day you look back at your Discovery Log and realise that a strange light you saw at level 32 was part of it all along.