i.
Discover
Every body is new. Find out what it can sense, how it moves and what it can eat, often by getting it wrong.
Play every ancestor you never met.
From a single cell to the first fire · Coming to Steam, iOS and more
The journey
A billion years. One life at a time.
In each era you live one life, in a body built from the fossils of its time. Learn it, survive it, and hand something on to the next.
- I. Between the Grains, Perhaps a billion years ago: A single cell. Hunt in the film of water between grains of sand. Hide from things a hundred times your size. Grow until you can divide.
- II. The Garden of Ediacara, About 555 million years ago: A soft body with a front and a back. Creep across a sea floor carpeted in microbes, while storms bury the world around you.
- III. Backbone, About 518 million years ago: One of the first fish. Eyes, and the first rod of a backbone, in a sea suddenly full of hunters.
- IV. The Water’s Edge, About 375 million years ago: Fins that bear weight. Lungs, a neck and the bones of a wrist, at the edge of the first forests as the pools dry.
- V. Beneath Giants, About 67 million years ago: A small mammal among dinosaurs. Forage by night beneath the feet of giants, with a litter waiting to be fed.
- VI. The Canopy, About 10 million years ago: Hands, eyes and kin. Cross the treetops with your family. Grasp, sway, and keep each other safe.
- VII. The Ember, About 100,000 years ago: One of us. Carry a living ember through a storm, so the others can make a new fire.
I
Between the Grains
Perhaps a billion years ago
A single cell.
Hunt in the film of water between grains of sand. Hide from things a hundred times your size. Grow until you can divide.
The real historyHow it plays
Discover. Survive. Pass it on.
Every era gives you a new body and a new world. What carries over is what life has always carried: the things your ancestors learned the hard way.
ii.
Survive
Something bigger is always hungry. Read it, hide from it, slip past it. The world doesn’t wait for you to be ready.
iii.
Pass it on
Every life ends by handing something on: a divided cell, a fed litter, a family kept together. Then the next era begins.
The science is real
Every creature is real. Every liberty is admitted.
Hidden in every era are memories to find. Each keeps three things apart: what the fossils show, what scientists reconstruct, and what the game made up so you could play it.
Try it: switch between the layers of a real memory from the game.
Memory found · Between the Grains
LUCA
“Every living thing is family: you share one distant ancestor with the bacteria in the soil.”
All known cellular life shares one genetic code, the same kind of ribosome and hundreds of genes that can be traced back by comparing genomes. One 2024 model places LUCA roughly 4.2 billion years ago.
Source to read: Moody et al. 2024, Nature Ecology & Evolution
What’s ahead
The journey is longer than it looks.
Five times, life on Earth nearly ended. Every one of your ancestors lived through all five. Some chapters stay sealed until you reach them.
Planned chapters can change as we playtest. Nothing here is a release promise.
Deep time
The recent past gets very small.
Zoom from the age of the Earth to a single lifetime. On the scale of this journey, everything humans have ever written down is thinner than a hair.
This ruler spans1.05 billion years
All of recorded history would be thinner than a hair on this ruler: 0.00050% of it.
2 out of view
Roadmap
Where we are, where we’re going.
Plans, not promises. We’ll share dates when we’re sure of them, and people on the list hear first.
Now
Playtesting
Every era you’ve seen here can be played today, in private playtests. We watch where people get lost, stuck or delighted, and fix it.
Next
Closed beta
Invites go out to people on the list, a few at a time. We’re building a way to tell us what’s hard from right inside the game.
Then
Launch
One journey, wherever you play.
SteamiPhone & iPadAndroidWebBeyond
More of the story
Sealed chapters, new memories to find, and more of the tree of life. It’s a big tree.
Support
Help us build it.
Before Us is made by a small independent studio, every creature drawn by code in our own engine. If you want to see the whole journey finished, here’s how to help.
Join the list
The simplest thing, and it matters: it tells us people want this, and gets you a beta invite.
Get a beta inviteTell someone
Know someone who loves fossils, deep time or beautiful small games? Send them here.
Back the studio
A way to support development directly, with a look behind the scenes, is on its way.
Join the list and you’ll be the first to know.
Beta invites
Be one of the first to play.
Join the list for a beta invite and the occasional letter from the studio: new eras, first looks, and launch news.
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