Opalfall is out. Today, on iOS and Android, free.
It started because my son asked for a block game that was more fun than the ones he had. He wanted lava. He wanted waves. That was the entire brief, and I said yes the way you say yes to a small favour.
It became ten worlds.
What’s in it
The whole journey ships today — not a slice of it. Ten hand-built worlds, each with its own element, colour and rules, so the same simple loop keeps changing under you: a furnace still cooling, a sea with no shore, a storm that never breaks, a place where gravity is more of a suggestion.
The Surge is still my favourite thing in there. Fill the meter, fire it, and the world’s own element sweeps the whole board, lava erupts, the tide comes in, lightning walks across the grid. Every world discharges differently, and I never got tired of watching it.
Underneath there’s a quiet story about one light broken into pieces, told through opal shards you find as you play. There’s a ship you upgrade between runs, traders you meet along the route, and a genuine endgame past the tenth world for anyone who goes looking.
And there’s Roy — a small pixel astronaut in the corner of the board who was meant to be a two-hour placeholder and is now, according to my son, the best part of the game. Leave the app sitting too long and he starts saying things like “THE BLOCKS MISS YOU.”
Thank you
If you’re reading this, you were probably here before there was anything to download. That mattered more than you’d think during the long middle stretch where a game is just a folder of unfinished ideas.
If you play it and it lands for you, leaving a rating today genuinely helps — more than anything else you could do. The stores decide whether to show a new game to strangers based largely on its first days, and a solo release lives or dies on that.
Ten worlds wait in the void. Go break the light out of the stone.
Thank you!
— Alex