For generations, the Great Wall has stood between our lands and everything beyond them.

That is the first thing you hear when you start a new campaign in The Last Bastion. Before Act I, before the burning villages, the bridges and the Bastion itself, there is now a prologue: Act 0, The Fall of the Great Wall. Four story missions on one section of the Wall, from a quiet morning to the day it all comes down.

The Great Wall running to the horizon, the wild lands beyond it

In-game capture from the opening cinematic: the Great Wall, all the way to the horizon.

A wall worth defending

The first version of Act 0 had a wall the size of the one you defend in every other level. Next to the story we wanted to tell, it looked like a garden fence. So we rebuilt it. The Great Wall is now three and a half times the size of the playable wall: almost fourteen metres high, more than eleven metres thick, two rows of battlements with a paved walk between them. It runs across the whole battlefield and on to the horizon, and great towers close the walk at both edges of the map.

The Great Wall seen from the battlefield, fallen raiders and stakes at its foot

From the field, the Wall is a cliff.

There are no roads in Act 0. The Iron Horde comes out of the passes in the far rim, crosses open ground straight to the foot of the Wall and starts hammering at the stone. Behind the Wall lie farmland, villages and the Bastions on the hills, and the Horde will never see them, as long as the Wall stands. If the Wall breaks, the mission is lost.

Fighting from the battlements

Because the Wall is the last line, everything happens on top of it. The Builder places towers on nineteen tower spots along the walk, more than eleven metres above the field, and a ballista up there still reaches the whole field below. There is no building on the ground in Act 0.

The Builder's view: ballistas on the tower spots of the walk, the field in front of the Wall

The Builder's view in Mission 4: ballistas on the walk, the Horde in the field.

The Hero stands on the walk too, and stays there. You can run along it from tower to tower, but you cannot jump down, blink down or wander off the end: the Wall holds you. That is also why only the Elementalist and the Hunter can be chosen in Act 0. Heroes who fight at range belong on a wall; the Soldier joins the campaign later, when the fight comes down to the ground.

The Hunter on the wall walk between the merlons, the battlefield beyond

The Hunter on the walk during the first wave of Mission 2.

Four missions, one stretch of stone

Act 0 tells one story in four moments:

  • Fortify the Wall. A newly assigned commander takes over a quiet section. Nobody expects a battle. A checklist asks you to place your first towers and spend your gold. A lone scout appears at the edge of the trees, watches, and runs. Then the horns: forty-four raiders, grunts and shieldbearers test the Wall, and the garrison cheers when they break.
  • The Battle Continues. The dead still lie before the Wall when the Horde comes back, from two passes now, in seven growing waves: shieldbearers, drummers, ash throwers and Breakers. No celebration at the end, only an exhausted garrison.
  • Hold the Wall. Weeks of siege. Twenty minutes of almost constant pressure from three passes, while reports from the rest of the Wall come in, each one worse than the last. Then, without warning, the Horde pulls back. Nobody knows why.
  • The Battlefield Has Changed. The answer.

Soldiers in rank on the wide wall walk between two rows of merlons

The garrison on the walk before the last battle.

The sky turns black

Mission 4 starts like the others. The defenders know exactly what to do; they have beaten the Horde three times. Three minutes into the fight, the sky darkens. What was that?

The Ashwing dragon comes out of the clouds, burns towers along the walk (never all of them) and leaves the Wall at three quarters of its strength. AshWing flyers follow, then the Horde's main host. The east tower falls. There are no reinforcements! The Horde raises its ladders and climbs onto the walk.

The Ashwing dragon breathing fire over the Great Wall

The Ashwing over the Great Wall.

Orcs on the wall walk among burning braziers and defenders

The Horde on the walk.

Then the dragon returns. The Wall is down to its last stones, WALL INTEGRITY CRITICAL, and the officer shouts the words nobody on that Wall ever expected to hear: THE WALL IS LOST! And then: RETREAT! DEFEND THE BASTIONS!

Run, Commander

The objective becomes RETREAT. You have 75 seconds to reach the evacuation point along the walk, with an arrow pointing the way, soldiers fleeing past you and sections of the Wall collapsing behind you. Make it, and the closing cinematic shows what you could not stop: the Great Wall falling section by section, the Horde pouring through, and the camera rising over the farmland to the Bastions on the hills.

The Great Wall broken open, the Horde pouring through the breach

The Great Wall breaks.

The Wall has fallen. Every Bastion is now on its own. Prepare the defenses.

The result screen does not say VICTORIOUS. It says RETREAT SUCCESSFUL, under the title The Great Wall Has Fallen. And that is where Act I begins.

The farmland and the Bastions under the title The Great Wall Has Fallen

The last shot of Act 0.

Under the hood

  • The story is data. Every mission has one story file with states, beats that react to the game (waves, the mission clock, the Wall, the evacuation point) and its cinematics. A new story mission needs no new code.
  • Cinematics run in the engine. Their own camera, letterbox, subtitles in English and Dutch, titles, camera shake and slow motion. Hold Space to skip; skipping makes every change the scene would have made, so a skipped cinematic never breaks the mission.
  • Tested by a bot. A test player plays all four missions in the editor, with and without cinematics, checks the states, the objectives, the Wall, the result and the save, and takes screenshots of every camera shot. That is how we found cameras staring straight into a merlon, a Horde that broke the Wall before the dragon came back, and a hidden castle that could still cost you the mission after the Wall had already fallen.

The briefing of Mission 2 in the campaign book, with the Soldier marked as later

The briefing of Mission 2: the Soldier waits for later.

What's next

Act 0 is playable on our development branch and goes into a playtest first. Is the Wall strong enough now that the Horde hits it directly? Do the cinematics have the right length? After that come the voices: the narrator's opening lines are written and ready to be recorded. And then Act I, and the question every player will have after that last shot: what happens to the Bastions once the Wall is gone?

All images are in-game captures from Unity, taken during the test runs of 7 October 2026. The game is in development; everything you see can still change.