Frequently asked questions

An archaeology adventure simulator. You lead a field research team: you study the records, survey the ground, open a trench in the right place, lift what you find without breaking it, restore it in the laboratory, and follow what it tells you. Simulation, exploration and mystery in roughly equal measure — not an action game and not a treasure hunt.

Yes. ARCHEVIA is a single-player game with a story campaign. There is no multiplayer mode and no always-online requirement.

The campaign runs across eight chapters, each in a different region with its own ground, climate and technique. A focused run through the main story is the length of a long single-player campaign; excavating thoroughly, restoring everything and filling the museum takes considerably longer.

There is a story, and it is built out of the digging rather than told over the top of it. A symbol appears on an ordinary sherd, then again three regions away, and the chain of finds leads to a civilisation that appears in no history book. You uncover the plot by excavating it.

You can damage a find by reaching for the wrong tool, and you can burn a season's budget by opening a trench in the wrong place. Damage is recoverable — a cracked artefact can be restored — but part of what it had to tell you may be lost. The game is about care, not about punishment.

The excavation follows real practice: stratigraphy, context recording, the correct tool for the correct material, and lifting in the correct order. The sites, the artefacts and the lost civilisation at the centre of the story are fiction, built to respect the discipline rather than to reproduce a specific real dig.

No. Nothing in ARCHEVIA is solved by fighting.

PC via Steam first. Builds for the Apple App Store and Google Play follow. Other platforms are under consideration and will be announced here and on the announcement list if they are confirmed.

No date has been announced yet. The most reliable way to hear first is to wishlist the game on Steam and to join the announcement list on this site — both get the news on the same day.

Closed tests are planned before release. Invitations go out to the announcement list, so signing up is the way in.

The price has not been set. It will be announced on the store pages before release, together with any launch discount.

The game is in development. If any part of it ships as early access, the store page will say so plainly and will explain exactly what is and is not in the build you would be buying.

No. ARCHEVIA is played offline. Your storefront may need a connection to install or to verify your licence the first time, but the game itself does not.

Not confirmed. If they happen, they will be announced on the Steam page.

Twenty-one: English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Polish, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Arabic. This website is fully translated into all of them.

Interface, subtitles and all written material — field notebooks, records, inscriptions — are translated in full. Any voice work will be in English with subtitles in every supported language.

Yes. The Arabic version of this site lays out right-to-left, and the game's interface does the same.

Yes, and we would be glad of it. If you spot a line that reads badly in your language, send us the language, the page and the sentence and we will fix it.

Final requirements are set close to release and published on the Steam page. The game is being built to run on mid-range hardware from the last several years rather than to demand the newest.

Subtitles with adjustable size, full key rebinding, a reduced-motion mode, colourblind-safe indicators for survey and analysis readouts, and adjustable timing on anything that would otherwise require quick input.

It does. If your system asks for reduced motion, the opening curtain, the scan lines, the drifting dust and the parallax are all switched off, and only the content remains.

Full controller support is planned for the PC release, and the mobile builds are designed for touch from the start.

At the storefront you bought from — Steam's refund page, Apple's report-a-problem, or Google Play's refund process. They hold the transaction; we do not, and we cannot issue a refund on their behalf.

No. There are no microtransactions, no loot boxes, no season pass and no advertising in the game.

Saves are stored locally and, where the storefront supports it, in its own cloud save service. Transferring a save between different storefronts is not supported.

Email us with what happened, what you expected, your platform and — if you can — the save file and a screenshot. Reports with a reproduction path get fixed first.

Yes. You may record, stream and publish footage on any platform and monetise it — ads, subscriptions, memberships, sponsorships, tips — without asking us and without paying us. The full conditions are in section 8 of the Terms of Use, and they are short.

Yes, for coverage of the game. Please do not re-upload a trailer on its own as a standalone video with nothing added.

Email info@bormansa.com with your outlet or channel and a link to your work. Keys go out ahead of release to press and to creators.

No. The monetisation permission covers video and streaming, not merchandise, prints or any physical or digital product using our art, logos or characters.

Only an email address, and only if you type one into the announcement form. Beyond that, the site counts page views with Google Analytics — but only if you accept it on the banner. Decline and nothing at all is measured. There is no advertising and no cross-site tracking either way.

None that identifies you. There is no telemetry sent to us, no advertising identifier and no analytics SDK in the game on any platform.

Use the unsubscribe link in any message, or write one line to info@bormansa.com. It is deleted, not merely flagged.

No advertising cookies. The site keeps a few preference values in your own browser — theme, language, whether the intro has played, the address you typed into the announcement form, and your answer to the analytics banner — and they never leave your device. If you accept analytics, Google adds two cookies of its own; if you decline, it adds none. The Cookie Policy lists all of them.

The game contains no violence and no purchasable content. This website's announcement list, however, is intended for adults, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.