New Zealand-based indie developer Little Lost Fox is closing in on a release of their debut title, the gorgeous and shockingly unique puzzler called Valleys Between. I know they’re getting close because today the team has soft-launched the game in both New Zealand and Australia, and so it’s got to be like pretty darn finished, right" Valleys Between is almost impossible to describe, and while that makes my job more difficult it’s also the thing that makes this game stand out the most.

The idea is to create environments and exist for as many years as possible while creating balance in nature and fighting off nasty things like factories that don’t fit into the harmony of the Earth. You control a 5×5 board of hexagons which you can manipulate with a quick flick of your thumb. So for example a dirt hexagon can be flicked up to create a water hexagon, and that action will turn all the bordering hexagons into grass areas. Flick a grass area and you can create a tree, and get some trees clustered together and you can flick on one of those to create a forest. Flick a cluster of forests and create a farmhouse, and so on and so forth. There’s actually A LOT more to it than that, but those are the core elements behind Valleys Between and it’s somewhat reminiscent of the type of combining and land management you do in Spry Fox’s brilliant Triple Town (Free). Creating forests will scroll the playfield into the background, taking yo...