A Nordic open-world survival saga
The Deep North
Sung into being in Iron Age Finland — where the home is kept warm so the horizon can stay vast and terrible and beautiful.
PC first · Designed cross-platform: console & mobile · Godot 4.7 · Offline-first solo play · Online open world on the road
The Saga Begins
From Ilmatar's first song on the primal waves to a cold ember beside a silent clan fire — this is how Home & Horizon opens. A teal nests on a knee; six golden eggs become the world; and a Song-Seeker wakes on the shore of Kalevala with one duty: carry the fire's warmth out with you. It will not last.
The opening as it plays today, two minutes from the first plate to the keeper standing up — recorded straight from the game, plates and world alike. Sound on.
The Vision
Home & Horizon: The Deep North is a Nordic survival saga where three Iron Age peoples each fight to keep their own hearth lit — while a cracked cosmic mill poisons the North, and the fighting itself feeds the rot. You are a Song-Seeker, one among many, mending what you can reach.
“Make the Home so warm, textured, and grounded that the Horizon feels terrifyingly vast. That tension is our entire design.”
There are no fireballs here. Magic is väki — the power that lives in iron, birch, bone and water. You craft by singing a thing's Origin to a heartbeat rhythm; a pure song makes a sharper blade, and every masterwork carries its maker's signature carved into the grain.
Warmth and hunger are real clocks, tuned for 15–20 minute journeys. A fed, protected stead stores the strength you need to range further — cook, build, raise your comfort, and let the fire push back the night. The home is not a menu. It is the engine of the expedition.
No faction can stand alone: iron, grain and salt all cross the same storm-sea. Selfish play raises the world's fracture — the sea darkens, the sun pales, things wake in the deep. Cooperation is not kindness here. It is survival mathematics.
The World
The Sampo — the abundance-mill that kept the world in harmony — has cracked, and its three rings carry the runes of three peoples. Only together can they mend it. Until then, the Black Winter's rot bleeds through lake, field and fjord.
The Kalevan-Väki · Forest-Kin · Finland
Labyrinthine, ethereal, hidden. Roads are water.
A thousand lakes veiled in mist, birch-cradles and peat bogs, old taiga guarded by spirits. The Väki sing iron into being and read the world through haltija-motes in the fog; their prestige is antler and bone, their halls are cones of moss and weathered log, and their villages stand on stilts over mirror-still water.
The lakes have begun to bleed — groves turn Hiisi, an offended sacred place rotting from within — and the Väki hold the forest's last healthy heart while their neighbours hunger for it.
The Svea-Fold · Hearth-Guard · Sweden
Order, iron, and the golden earth — a land being tamed.
Wide wheat plains ruled from dressed-stone halls, where the Great Forges never cool and every road obeys the Runes of Law. The Svea-Fold are the world's economic engine: caravans, granaries, sea-forts and the Thing, where law is made by consent and votes become blessings.
But their land-spirits are fleeing. The golden plains parch into turning dust, and only Kalevala's pristine waters can save their cattle — at any cost. They conquer because they must.
The Sea-Kings · Norway
Salt, verticality, and desperation. The ocean is not a barrier — it is a highway.
Cliff-shards and black fjords under a thin, storm-grey light, where tarred stave-halls hang over the surf and dragon-headed prow-posts shed the snow. The Nordmenn are the master shipwrights of the North: they read storms as omens, measure worth in oaths kept, and flank the world's trade through the Arctic breach.
Their fjords freeze in midsummer as the Pale Sun weakens — and they need Kalevala's World-Tree timber to keep their ships, and their way of life, afloat.
Between them lies Austmarr, the storm-sea every trade must cross — and in its Eye, half-sunk, the cracked Sampo waits for three peoples to stop feeding the storm and start mending the song.
The Road
The MVP is not a slice of everything — it is one continent made complete: a full survival home in the Finnish lakeland, played in 15–20 minute sessions, offline-first, built for PC and designed from the first triangle to carry over to console and mobile. Then the world grows, ring by ring.
The first 15–20 minutes at the Kylä shore camp: the four quests of the opening, the rhythm of the Song, the Hiisi birch and the burning longship on the horizon — verified end to end by an automated playthrough gate.
The full single-player Kalevala: the survival loop, gathering and song-crafting, stead-building, the clan, the five roaming bands, the Hiisi night finale. Fun three sessions in a row.
2–6 players share Finland: accounts and cloud saves, shared Steads, one world-encounter seed per day so everyone meets the same wolf pack. Roles emerge — crafter, explorer, trader, leader.
The second continent and the storm-sea: longships that carry players and cargo on the Storm Seer's windows, first cross-faction trade at a neutral island, and the World Fracture made visible — the storm turns violet.
Svearike joins the North: caravans and sea-fort tolls, Thing votes and raid windows, the great bosses waking at fracture thresholds — and the cooperative season finale: a joint voyage to the Eye-of-Discord to mend the Sampo together.
Beyond Kalevala
The MVP is one continent made whole. The destination is the whole North: an open-world online survival saga where Kalevala, Svearike and Nordvegr share one world, one storm-sea and one cracked Sampo — and where what each people does to the land is felt by all the others. A few things waiting further up the road:
Trade, truce or raid. Thing votes turn a people's will into law and blessings; border brokers carry fur, salt, iron and rumour between the three. When the World Fracture climbs, rivals face a choice: coordinate their trade and their strikes, or watch the Bleed eat everyone's harvest.
Longships that need a crew to row, defend the cargo and read the storm. Caravans on the King's Road, shared steads, joint strikes against what wakes in the deep. Ship speed and safety scale with how well people work together — cooperation is not a toggle, it is how the North survives.
Beneath three cultures lies one root: the First Song that wove the world and the Sampo that kept it in tune. The Väki call the rot Hiisi, the Svear the Song of Discord, the Nordmenn wyrd gone wrong — three names for one wound, and one rite that can mend it: the Tietäjä, the Thing Speaker and the Storm Seer, singing together at the Eye-of-Discord.
Three continents with the Austmarr between them, seasons that turn for everyone at once, a living saga server whose world remembers. And when you want the quiet, the hearth is still yours: solo play stays offline-first, all the way.
Gallery
Straight from the living build — the Kylä shore camp through the turning year. Painterly PBR: grounded silhouettes, story in the surfaces, myth in the light.
Through the Turning Year
The same camp fire, the same birch woods — through spring thaw, the white nights of summer, the rust of autumn and the blue cold of winter, at dawn, at noon and in the dark. Seasons are not a filter here: snow lies, ice grows on the sea, and the night is long enough to fear.
Weather
Fog that swallows the path, lake-mist at first light, rain that greys the shore, snow in the pines and summer storms that split the sky. Weather changes what you can see, how far you dare go, and how fast the cold finds you.
From the Design Atelier
Every continent is composed before it is built — faction design documents where palette, silhouette, sound and soul are fixed. Glimpses from the Svea-Fold and Nordvegr folios:
In Play Now
Not concept art: these systems run in the build today, at the Kylä shore. Captures keep the in-game interface, because the interface is part of the story.
Choose a piece from the build radial — log bench, workbench, watch fire, pole fence, fish-drying rack, birch-bark kota, log raft — set its ghost where it fits the ground, carry the wood, and raise it stage by stage: poles, bark, finished. Every piece is a real object with weight and a purpose at the hearth.
You do not survive alone. Ask the clan for help from a radial — help build, fetch from the stores, gather, cook — and watch them take it up: Seppä carries timber from the stores, Aino lashes the poles, and three pairs of hands raise a kota faster than one. When it stands, everyone eats. Talkoot, the old Finnish word for shared work, is a mechanic here.
Lash a log raft, push off and paddle — past the skerries the swell runs high and grey, and Ahti's current turns you back toward shore. Come home to a warm kota and a shared meal: the hearth is where strength for the next trip is stored.
Swing from the right, from the left or overhead, or drive in a thrust; dodge in eight directions; kick, fight bare-fisted, take the blow on your shield. Physical bodies that flinch and stagger, weight in every hit, restraint in the camera — closer to a struggle than a dance. The feel is being tuned right now; a clip joins this page when it lands.
The Maker
Lead Developer & Creative Director
Fifteen years in technology — a lifetime in games. By day, Elja is a Senior Data & AI Architect at Aitomation: a solution architect, systems thinker and creative innovator with a scientist's curiosity to learn, an engineer's love of complex problems and an entrepreneur's drive to get things done and make an impact. Nearly a decade and a half of building and leading high-tech organisations and projects — from startups and NGOs to global corporations and EU sustainability programmes — across AI and agentic systems, data platforms, cloud architectures and data-driven decision making.
Author of the debut book Beyond Survival, with the technical release Rational Agent in the making, and an R&D lead on AI, sustainability and the regenerative transition at CISUREGEN. A neo-generalist by heart: sustainable impact over momentary trends, fit-for-purpose over a mindless race for efficiency.
But the deepest root of this game is older than the career: a lifelong enthusiasm for RPGs, survival, strategy, MMO and open-world games — the worlds that teach you to read a landscape, keep a fire and trust a stranger. Add the musical ear and the drawing hand of a lifetime, and you have the authenticity this North deserves: systems built by an architect, felt by a player, heard and seen by an artist.
“There have never been enough games rooted in the Finnish Iron Age — in the Kalevala's mythic identity and the folklore my own roots grow from. Home & Horizon is the game I have wanted to exist for as long as I can remember. Its success is personal.”
Join the Journey
This world is being built in the open, one honest session at a time — and it needs people who love the North as much as its maker does.
A designated Telegram channel opens soon — the hearth-fire of the community. Follow development from day one, see the world grow in weekly captures, and tell us what sings and what falls flat. Every tester is welcome; early feedback shapes the North more than any plan.
Telegram — opening soon
An open call to culture markets, museums, musicians, sculptors and craftspeople: help us give this world its true objects, sounds and faces. This is not a history project — it is mythical realism, and it deserves the real North's imagination.