UPHILL GAMES
UPHILL GAMES
A very small studio, and where it comes from.
Uphill Games makes small games about how something in the real world actually works. A wildfire on a Spanish mountain and the people who have to get off it. The stone channels that water that mountain. The terraces cut into it, and the farming that keeps them standing. Each one is meant to be as true as we can make it, and where a game simplifies something, it says so.
In the nineteen eighties a cousin started writing a game on a ZX Spectrum: a tower block on fire, people on the roof, one helicopter to lift them off. He never finished it. I never forgot it.
Years later I stayed at Cortijo del Cura, a house high on the mountain above Lanjarón in the Sierra Nevada, in southern Spain, and watched a real fire burning across the Béznar valley. The cousin's unfinished game and the mountain in front of me turned out to be the same game. The tower block became a mountain, the roof became a ridge, and the helicopter kept the problem that made the original good: it can only carry one thing at a time. Water, or people, never both, and never quite enough time.
Because the things these games are about are genuinely interesting, and almost nobody gets to see them work. You can read that fire climbs a slope faster than it burns down one. It is a different thing to watch a fire you started run uphill towards a village while you decide, in the moment, whether this trip carries water or carries people. A game can teach a real system in a way a paragraph cannot, by letting you act inside it and feel what happens.
Fire is the first game, not the whole idea. The same mountain holds the next ones: the acequias, the old stone irrigation channels that still carry snowmelt across the hillside; the terraces, and the work of keeping soil on a steep slope; regenerative farming on ground that has been worked for centuries. Taken together it is a studio about how a landscape works, and about the people who work it.
It is free, with no advertising and nothing collected about you, because being shared matters more than being sold. To reach us, see contact.