UMBRA´S ECHO

Umbra's Echo – City of Forgotten Shadows

Every person in your town lives with one foot in the light and one in the shadows. When someone dies – or is simply forgotten – they don't disappear. They become a shadow, lingering near their family home… for as long as someone still remembers them.

Umbra's Echo is a cozy-but-melancholic pixel-art city builder about memory. Grow a small island settlement into a city across four ages, manage a tight economy – and look after the minds of every single citizen.

Memory is your most important resource

- Every citizen has a name, a family and a memory. They remember housemates, coworkers, partners and the dead.

- Balance is everything: remember too little and people grow hollow, remember too much and they sink into grief. Both cost them their *self* – and a person who loses their self walks into the shadows while still alive.

- The dead stay with their families if there is enough shade around the home: forests, arbors, cemeteries. Children inherit their parents' memories, but a little weaker each generation.

- When no one remembers a soul anymore, it is lost forever.

The Day of the Dead

Every autumn the shadows walk freely through your streets. If at least three people still remember someone well, you can bring them back to life.

A real city builder underneath

- Roads matter: every building must connect to the village square.

- Finite resources: forests, stone, clay and iron ore run out. Berries and fish regrow slowly. Fields need sunlight, so tall buildings cast real, moving shadows across them.

- Production chains: grain → bread, clay → bricks, ore → tools, wool → clothing, grain → beer for the tavern.

- Tight economy: wages, upkeep, storage limits, tool wear, hungry winters and people who freeze without clothes.

- A research tree across four ages – from the Age of Settlers to the Age of Remembrance – with 35 technologies and 40+ buildings.

- Seasons and events:storms, fever, droughts, merchant caravans, foggy nights, ancestral dreams and harvest festivals.

- Milestones with rewards in every age, and a chronicle that keeps track of everything that happens.

 Make it your island

- Procedurally generated islands: choose map size, water, forest, rock and ore, fertile soil and resource richness – or enter a seed to share a map.

- Four difficulty levels, from *Easy* to *Nightmare*.

- Multiple save slots and autosave every 30 seconds.

- A playable 18-step tutorial right inside the game.

- Dynamic music that changes with day, night, winter and the Day of the Dead.

 Playtest

This is an early test version. Your feedback shapes the game: press the bug button in the game (or use *Report a bug / Feedback* in the pause menu) – your message goes straight to the developer.

Language: German, English

Controls: mouse and keyboard (WASD, mouse wheel, Esc for the pause menu, Space to pause)