An empty valley. Light falls on bare ground.

Cycle is a calm ecosystem game. You don't plant anything by hand or place any animals. You adjust three conditions (water, soil and shelter) and wait to see who arrives. The fourth is light, and it has no control: it depends on the trees you let grow.

Species arrive on their own. Each one has its own needs, and when they are met, it settles in. Once it settles, it changes the conditions for everyone else: mushrooms enrich the soil, ferns give cover, and every oak that grows offers shelter while taking light from what lies beneath it. A species that thrives can leave another with nowhere to live.

There is no upgrade tree. There is a web, and you set the climate.

The valley keeps living when the game is closed

It keeps its own clock, the real one: if it is night where you are, it is night in the valley too. Seasons pass. It rains, it snows, it dries out. Populations grow and settle back. And when you return (in an hour, tomorrow, next week) the game shows you what happened: a timelapse of the hours you missed and a journal written like field notes.

"No one sowed this: dragonflies in the valley."

That is the heart of the game. The rest is two minutes of adjusting before the phone goes back in your pocket. An idle game for spare moments: three or four visits a day. Cozy, slow and incremental, without the numbers taking over.

You won't come back to a ruined valley

Nothing that happens undoes what you have built. Events slow things down, push them off course, make them harder, but no species leaves the catalogue and no population drops to zero. If you are away for a week, the valley has gone a little wild. It hasn't broken.

Six eras

When a valley reaches its goal you can close it and open another: a new palette, new music, seventeen new species, the same rules.

• The Quiet Valley, all meadow and oaks, until the heron arrives.
• The Glaciation: rock lichen, lemmings, the ptarmigan and a bear on the ridge.
• The Caldera: life returning over the ash, fire salamanders, giant tortoises and a condor.
• The Pixel Marsh, in pixel art: fiddler crabs, noctiluca on the shore and a flock of flamingos.
• The Leviathan Sanctuary: ferns, araucarias, triceratops and velociraptors, until the tyrannosaurus arrives.
• The Era of the Cataclysm: the meteor falls and the valley starts again from the ash, until the crater is a lake and the crocodile returns.

The rules you learned still hold. The conditions that worked for you don't.

A closer look

Pinch to zoom into the valley. Every era has its passing animals: squirrels, hedgehogs, snakes, stoats, arctic foxes, lizards, schools of fish, an otter in the marsh. The game draws the valley itself as it runs, and a mature valley looks like no one else's, because it comes from your conditions and its own history. When an era ends you can send a postcard of it.

Eco

A bat lives in the valley. It sleeps by day, shares true fun facts about every species and, if you get stuck, gives you a hint. If you'd rather have quiet, it only talks when you tap it.

What isn't here

No ads. No in-app purchases. No chests, draws or random rewards. No energy that runs out and no waits you can pay to skip. No accounts of its own, no required sign-up, and it plays offline: the game has no internet permission. If you like, Play Games keeps a cloud copy of your valley in your Google account and gives you 50 achievements; that copy is made by Play Games, and if you don't use it, you don't need it. The only data collected is Play Games data: it goes to your Google account, never to the developer. You pay once, and that's it.

In English and Spanish.

Cycle asks nothing of you. It will still be there when you come back.