Ironwood Vale is a small valley kingdom, and for most of its history nothing happened in it worth writing down. Then the great Ironwood at the western edge of the wood began to sicken, black sap ran in its roots, and things that had been sleeping under the valley woke up hungry.

The hero of this story is a village child from Brighthollow who found a sword in a cellar. That is the entire qualification. What follows is a guide to everything that child has to walk through: a forest, a lake, a mountain, and the three things at the bottom of them.

The Heart Of It

You begin with three hearts. Four shards forge one container; each dungeon treasury holds a whole one; the shop sells a charm worth another. Collect all of it and the hero ends the game on eight.

Seven shards exist in the vale. Four make your container; the other three stay in your pocket, and there is no eighth. A shard that completes nothing still heals two hearts, so a spare is a potion.

How To Move

The hint line under the HUD reads whichever device you last touched. Plug in a pad mid‑game and the on‑screen buttons step aside; touch the glass and they come straight back.

The Order Of Things

The vale is open; its gates are not. Each dungeon hands you the tool that opens the next one.

• 1The Ironwood (A4) stands open from the first minute. It gives you the bow.
• 2An arrow into the stone eye at the pier (E3) raises a drowned walkway to the isle (E4).
• 3The hookshot crosses the gorge at C2 and puts you on the mountain's north rim.
• 4The gauntlet opens the black door at the summit (C1) — from the inside, on your way out.

Where The People Are

Nine of them, and all nine are worth going back to after each dungeon falls.

Brighthollow (C3): Elder Rowan, who pays for good news; Marda's shop; and Pip, out in the square. Home (C4): your mother. The East Fields (D3): Old Weck and his crows. Namm (F4) watches the lake. Brindle (E5) has been about to launch his raft for years. The hermit (D1) knows what the sealed doors want. And on the south road (C5), Skitter — if you let him live.

The Swing Has A Rhythm

The sword clears a 120° wedge, hinged at your hands and reaching a little over a tile. It is generous sideways and useless behind you.

What matters is the metronome. A swing roots you for 0.15 seconds — you do not move, at all, and you cannot fire the bow, the hook or the fist — and then holds the button off for another 0.15. That is 0.30 seconds between swings, about three a second, and it is a floor you cannot get under. Mashing the key does nothing that patience would not have done.

The game is on your side about it: a press you make during either half is remembered and fires the instant the lockout ends. So tap it on the beat, not in a panic. And every hit that lands stops the whole world for a twenty-second of a second — that half-frame of silence is the game telling you the blow counted.

The cadence is deliberate, and it is the difference between the Depths and the Bastion. Room 22 has five things in it. You cannot out-swing five things; you have to out-walk them and swing three times.

There are exactly three red notches in the whole game — room 24's north wall, room 40's, room 56's — and finding one on the plan is the same as finding the boss. Gold is nearly as useful: count the gold notches in a wing and you know how many keys that wing is going to ask you for.

Slate is the vague one, on purpose. It means the door is waiting on the room: usually every enemy dead, sometimes a lever, sometimes a plate under a block. The map will not tell you which. It will only tell you that standing there and pushing is not going to work.

Every boss and every lieutenant in the vale has exactly one moment when it can be hurt, and the game is scrupulous about telling you which of your hits landed in it. Listen to the sword.

Outside the window, a hit clinks: a flat grey wash over the sprite, a small muffled note, and no health lost — and in the Goblin King's case, no sound at all, just the grey. Inside it, the hit rings: a hard bright crack, the body pops a fraction bigger, white flashes across it, and the bar actually moves. Two damage, not one.

This is the most useful feedback in the game and it costs nothing to use. If you are standing in front of something hearing clinks, you are not fighting it wrong by a little. You are fighting it on the wrong beat entirely, and the answer is almost never the sword on its own.

Rot and hunger. The Depths are what the sickness in the great tree looks like from underneath: a goblin warren that moved into somebody else's ruin, twenty-four rooms of webs, chasms and bad light, with a king at the bottom of it wearing a crown he found.

Take the cellar door in the Ironwood's roots. Three small keys, one big one, and a bow that arrives early enough to be the dungeon's whole grammar — every locked wing here is really an archery problem.

Open With The Bow

Room 7 is a chasm strip with three eye-targets on the far side and no way across. That is the point. Hit all three and the north door opens — the first of four rooms in this dungeon (7, 14, 18, 23) that are locked behind arrows and nothing else.

Grab the floor plan from the chest in the foyer on your way past. It fills in the rooms you have not walked yet.

Three Keys, In Order

• 1Room 8, on a ledge across the bat chasm. Opens 9 → 10.
• 2Room 15, at the heart of the web maze. Opens the Hub's north door.
• 3Room 20, past the chasm bridges. Opens 20 → 21.

No key in the Depths is ever behind the door it opens. If you are stuck, you have missed a side room, not a trick.

Discipline and cold patience. A fortress the lake swallowed whole with its garrison still at their posts, and forty years later they are still at them. Where the Depths were a warren somebody squatted in, the Bastion is a building that was designed — and designed around the tool in its middle.

You cannot get here until an arrow finds the stone eye at the pier on E3 and raises the drowned walkway to the isle. Bring the bow. The Bastion still expects you to know how to use it.

Both Wings, Then The Winch

The two side rooms are not optional. Room 30 holds the key to the Drowned Gate behind a push-block pinch on a cistern ledge; room 33 holds the key to the Winch Room behind an arrow sequence over open water. The old item earns the new one.

Room 30 also has this dungeon's floor plan in it.

Fire, Reel, Yank

Room 35 exists to teach the hookshot in three gaps of rising length, with a coin islet as a reward for firing sideways. Four directions only, and it reels you onto the post's tile, not up to its edge.

Miss a crossing over deep water and you are reset to the last safe tile for a heart. It is a toll, not a death.

Temper barely held. The forge that made the Ember Gauntlet is still burning under the mountain, and the marker at the summit says what it is plainly: where the mountain keeps its temper. The rot in the roots and the cold in the lake were symptoms. This is the thing itself.

The sealed black door at C1 is not the way in. The way in is the gorge at C2 — hook across to the north rim and take the cave mouth. The door at the summit is the way out, and you open it from behind.

Two Exams, Then The Fist

Both side wings test something you already own. Room 45 is a post chain over a lava field — the hookshot's final. Room 48 is an eye-target pair across the widest lava span in the game, with cinder bats harassing your aim — the bow's. Each holds a key, and the Forge is behind both of them.

What The Gauntlet Does

Three things, and the mountain is built out of all three. Punch cracked rock and it shatters. Lift a boulder and carry it — there is no putting it down, only throwing it. Punch a molten rock in mid-air and it goes back where it came from, white-hot.

Room 51 makes you break two plugs to leave. That is the tutorial.

Marda's Shop, And What It Costs

Everyone has one more thing to say. Your mother, Rowan, Marda, Pip, Old Weck, Namm, Brindle, the hermit — and Skitter, if you spared him. Nine final lines, and nothing marks one of them on any map.

The credits roll from the elder's closing beat, once, or from your own bed as many times as you like.

The victory screen keeps three numbers on you: how long the run took, how many times you died, how many things you killed. The clock stops at the title, so putting it down costs nothing.

Nothing here is missable. Every shard, rumor and last line survives into the golden world. Finish first, then go back for the rest; the walk is shorter.

The Ironwood stands in that same gold — the tree the story starts under, lit the way it always should have been. Walk back to A4 and look. The shortest scene in the game.

This page is for people who have already put the Sovereign out. If you have not, everything below is a rumour and you have a mountain to be getting on with.

The vale's northeast corner used to be the edge of the world. The wall east of the Hermit's Shelf was solid rock and the map stopped there, because there was nothing on the other side of it. There is now, and it has been there the whole time, which is a different and worse thought.

Walk east off D1. What you find is the Cairn Road: scree, two waymarker cairns, a crow or two, and a stele worth the twenty seconds it takes to read. The screen's entire job is to make the walk feel like leaving the map, and it works.

The Seal In The Floor

Before the mountain falls, the thing in the middle of the ring is a seal — cracked corner to corner, mortared shut, and warm when you put a hand on it. The game will tell you that much and not one word more. Come back after, and it is not a seal any longer.

Somebody tied a knotted rope to the ring bolt and dropped it down the shaft. It is not long enough. Somebody knew that and dropped it anyway.

Walking in is not a mistake and costs you nothing. It is a door.

What It Wants

The early rooms are the vale's own bestiary, arranged by somebody with a sense of humour and no interest in your comfort. Nothing new is introduced; nothing needs to be. Everything you learned about walking away instead of swinging again is the whole curriculum, and these rooms are the exam on it.

Three of the nine are re-matches, and the cave does not stop to introduce them — no portrait, no drum roll, just a name in the corner of the screen and a fight already happening. You know all three answers. What is different is that there is no lieutenant one room back to remind you of them, no shrine to fall back to, and no way out except forward. That is the ordeal. It was never about new tricks.