After 5 years of radio silence, Valve's all-but canceled game re-emerges with 6-seconds of rare gameplay footage, and I mourn not getting to see these incredible water shaders in real life

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Pour one out for In The Valley of Gods

(Image credit: Valve)

The developers behind indie gem Firewatch once had another single-player first-person adventure in the works called In the Valley of Gods. That was, until Valve snapped 'em up and put the team to work on other projects. I'm still bummed out about it, though one former developer has stepped up to reveal a peep at what we could have got – and hey, might still get.

Over on BlueSky, Valve's Matthew Wilde – who is also behind Counter-Strike 2's water shaders and Half-Life: Alyx's excellent bottle shaders – has shown off what water looks like in The Valley of Gods, and it's beautiful. The six-second clip shows us walking behind our protagonist, surrounded by water, in a rather wee cave, with a shot of light in the distance.

It might not be much if you're not a water sicko like me, but it's still a rare peep at a video game we're all still wondering what the deal is with. At the time of writing, the Steam page remains up with a December 2029 release window locked in, though I imagine that's more of a placeholder situation right now.

In the Valley of Gods was initially announced in 2017, with a 2019 release set to follow. As you can imagine, that didn't quite happen. Developer Campo Santo was snapped up by Valve in 2018, and by the time the release window came, the project was put on hold as other developers had been put on other projects like Half-Life: Alyx and Dota Underlords.

The official line remains that the game is on hold and not scrapped, though we've not heard much since. If it resurfaces, though, we know the water tech will be top-tier.

Valve reminds Steam users they don't actually own a darn thing they buy, GOG pounces and says its games "cannot be taken away from you" thanks to offline installers.

Iain Harris
Iain Harris
News Editor, Games

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.