- Replica Éalú Mice Available - 3 September 2026
As with some of his past projects, our animator (Ivan) is making a limited series of replicas & other pieces of art available for sale. He's started with a series of 25 mice which are full scale, functional replicas of our game's mouse. So far mice # 1 through 8 have already sold. He'll be making them in batches of 5 until 25 are created and then will stop production.In the next couple of weeks, Ivan will also start creating carved wooden wall-art inspired by the game. Both the mice and the artwork will be available on Beyond the Bark's Website. As of publishing this bit of news, there are still 2 mice available from the current batch, and the next batch will likely be built in October.
- Éalú's now on Mac! We're celebrating with a fanart event. - 10 August 2026
We're excited about a huge milestone: Éalú is now available on Mac! Also, we just got featured in Make Magazine, which is an incredible honor. To celebrate, we're hosting our 2nd giveaway & discounting the game for the next week. Since Make magazine is all about creativity, and many mac users create art with their computers, we're centering this giveaway around creative process!For our 2nd giveaway, we're offering the actual heart puzzle that was used on the set of Éalú:The winner will receive the heart puzzle along with the 3 buttons the mouse used to interact with it in the game. We stress that this is NOT a replica: This will be the actual set pieces that Ivan built and that were used in the game itself. The giveaway will be a random drawing which players can enter by doing the following:Create a piece of fan art depicting the Éalú mouse! It can be hand-drawn, 3D rendered, crocheted,…
- Éalú Wins An Award! - 24 April 2026
Today at Ardán's FÍS '26 Games Summit the Irish Game Awards 2026 ceremony, helmed by Imirt (The Irish game making association), took place. Our team was absolutely thrilled to find out that Éalú received the prize for runner up in the category of Best Experimental Game in a field of beautiful & well crafted games created by people in Ireland!As Éalú was the debut game for everyone on our team, we feel incredibly honored and fortunate to have received this award. The day at the event was absolutely lovely, including the opportunity for us to demo our game for event participants, have great conversations with other game creators & experience first hand the amazing games built by other teams.As our team is spread very far apart geographically... here is a photo of our animator & conceptual designer, Ivan, receiving the award on behalf of the team and then walking awkwardly back to his seat…
- [Spoiler Warning] Visit A Location Where Éalú Was Made - 31 March 2026
On a dry morning in early May of 2025 our animator, Ivan, woke up before sunrise to capture a timelapse sequence for the end of our game. It rains regularly in the spring in the SouthWest of Ireland, so he had been waiting for just the right conditions. He packed up 3 mice & his camera gear and drove out to Lough Gur in Limerick County.The morning was perfect: no rain, a lovely mist resting on the surface of the lake and the sound of birds greeting the early light. As Ivan approached the corner of a stone wall to set up, to his great surprise a tiny mouse appeared from a crack in the wall squeaked in alarm and then darted into a different crack. It seemed like a sign that the corner of the wall was the right place to set the 3 wooden mice for the moment in Éalú where the mouse finds freedom, community and the natural world.If you enjoyed our game, happen to be in Ireland or visiting and…
- Hotfix 3: Screen Scaling Issue Resolved - 10 March 2026
Good evening! We have resolved a longstanding issue with our game not properly scaling at irregular monitor aspect ratios, and on the Steamdeck. Buttons and composited sprites should appear exactly where they should be regardless of your screen size. We appreciate your patience with this issue. Kind regards, -The Éalú Team
- Mouse raffle announcement + a gift for all Éalú players - 14 February 2026
Thank you so very much to everyone who entered our first ever giveaway! We were blown away by how many people participated, and how much care was expressed for our game and the mouse. We have a gift for all of our fans, so please read on past the winner announcement. We're excited to share that the winner of the mouse is ryan_wilsons.gallery! Congratulations Ryan!! The mouse will soon be en route to a new home.We also wanted to share the fastest time. FutureThrone795 managed to get the mouse to freedom in an astonishing 6 minutes & 31 seconds via a combination of exploiting a bug in the game & writing a program for themselves which determined the fewest moves needed to solve the circle puzzle. The video of their run is amazing.Finally, we wanted to express a sincere thank you to all of our players by providing a gift in the spirit of the manual craft which created our game: Free resourc…
- Win a Functional Replica of Our Mouse - 2 February 2026
As we approach Valentines day, we wanted to celebrate the love so many have shown for the Mouse! Our animator, Ivan, has built and signed a functional replica of the stop motion mouse puppet used to animate Éalú. We're going to give this little critter away to one of our players who wins our very first contest! We have no plans to sell replicas, so this is a rare opportunity.(Ivan gave this mouse a silver tail & darker gears to give it it's own personality) For this contest, the task is to beat us at our own game to be entered into a drawing to win the replica. We timed ourselves speedrunning the mouse to freedom from a fresh save slot. Based on that, the time to beat is 9min & 52sec. Here's the contest details:The deadline for entries is Feb 9th by 11:59pm GMT (6:59pm EST, 3:59pm PST)To enter the drawing you must:Post a video of your playthrough that shows starting with an empty save f…
- Steamdeck screen alignment workaround - 2 January 2026
Hi all!Steamdeck users have reported an issue with Éalú's screen alignment making some buttons in the game hard to press. Fortunately one of our players discovered startup options which correct this (thank you Orio!!) And we've verified the work around.For Steamdeck users:-windowed -screen-width 1280 -screen height 800For non deck users who run into similar trouble:-windowed -screen-width 1920 -screen height 1080We're looking into working on a patch for this. For those unsure how to use these start up options, here's a guide with steps on how to input them and it should correct the issue:Ealu screen alignment workaround guideThanks again to our growing community of players, we appreciate you and are thankful that you've taken an interest in the art we created.
- Hotfix 2: Unity Engine Version Update - 25 November 2025
Good afternoon!It was recently brought to our attention that the version of Unity our game was running on, (Unity 2022.3.15f1) was discovered to be susceptible to a security vulnerability earlier this year. Unity made it very clear that there was no evidence that this vulnerability was leveraged by bad actors, simply that a third party data security consultant had found it.At Unity's recommendation, we have upgraded Éalú to the closest patched version of the Unity Engine (Unity 2022.3.62f2). If you would like more information about this security risk, you may find it here: https://unity.com/security/sept-2025-01Thank you for your patience, and for continuing to enjoy Éalú!Kind Regards,The Éalú Team
- Enjoyed Éalú? Please consider nominating us for the Steam Awards! - 24 November 2025
Dear mouse caretakers, We're excited that our game released in time to potentially take part in the Steam Awards. If you enjoyed the experience our team created, we hope you'll consider nominating us. The category we personally suggest is "Outstanding Visual Style" We believe this is one of the most unique aspects of our game; that our team not only brought to life a stop motion character in situ within sets one frame at a time, but that this choice was completely in line with the journey of our character, the story we wanted to tell & the themes we explored. If you missed it, we recently shared a behind the scenes post on how our visuals were created.If our visual world resonated with you, the check box at the top of this post allows you to submit a nomination.Of course, if you loved the game & feel there's a category we'd be better suited for, we'd more than welcome that as well!Thank…
- Éalú is going on sale for Animal Fest starting Nov. 10th! - 8 November 2025
We're excited to announce that Éalú was accepted as part of Steam's Animal Fest! To celebrate, we're discounting our game by 20% for the duration of the event, from November 10th to 17th. Our team is thrilled that our clockwork mouse gets to be featured alongside a collection of other great games that are focused on or feature animal protagonists. We love that so many players feel like the wooden character we created is so full of life! Thank you for that - your minds are what turns the little creature from a thought into a being who lives in your shared imaginations. - The Éalú Dev Team
- Behind the Scenes of Éalú for International Animation Day - 28 October 2025
Hi all, Ivan here (our team's animator) To celebrate International Animation Day, I thought it could be fun to share some of the behind the scenes process of creating Éalú. Warning for those who haven't completed the game: There are spoilers ahead but I'll use Steam's feature to hide them unless you want to see!Today I'm excited to share:The physical setup for animating Éalú.How we planned & stayed organized during production.Some of my sources of inspiration for the animation in our project. Physical Animation SetupThe world of Éalú was built inside my roughly 2.5m x 4.5m (8ft x 15ft) garden shed, on top of this beast:That's my 1250x1250mm CnC routing table I normally use to build parts for live theatre sets, and is also the tool I used to carve all the wooden parts for the maze, puzzles, puppets and set pieces for our game. It doubles as an excellent stopmotion animation table, as it'…
- Thank you - Éalú in the news - 24 October 2025
We’re all so excited by the response to Éalú in the three weeks since we launched. Seeing players and reviewers from all over the world discover & enjoy our wooden mouse’s journey has been incredible.🇬🇧 Rock Paper Shotgun Published a thoughtful, philosophical article about Éalú on our launch day🇨🇳 Heybox / 小黑盒, in a Chinese language review, named Éalú one of the month’s top indie releases, praising its “unmatched stop-motion craftsmanship.”🇮🇪 RTÉ featured Éalú on the front page of their website as “a must-play puzzler” and celebrated it as a landmark Irish-made game.🌍 NoobFeed called the game “beautiful, haunting, and worth playing just to see the ending.”🇫🇷 Recalbox streamed Éalú live to hundreds of French-speaking viewers — merci beaucoup!🇮🇪 92.5 Phoenix FM in Dublin & UCC 98.3FM in Cork had our team on for interviews that turned into great chats!Since we're such a small te…
- Hotfix 1: Ulta Wide Compatibility and Circle Puzzle Bug - 13 October 2025
Happy Monday! This morning we have rolled out our first Hotfix for Éalú to address some issues that were reported by our players early on. Thank you is in order for the players who encountered these issues and went the extra mile in reporting them on our community pages!Our first hotfix addresses two issues:Éalú will now be able to run in full-screen on Ultra Wide monitors, with some letterboxing on the sides to maintain our intended aspect ratio.We have fixed an annoying bug with the Circle Puzzle, where the puzzle stopped responding to user input. We are a small team with a limited testing capability, engagement from our player's is crucial to making our game the best it can be for as many players as possible. Thank you so much for helping us, and for your patience!The game should update in your libraries or queue for an update in your downloads on Steam. If it does not update on it's…
- Known Issues: Proton/Linux - 3 October 2025
Hi everyone,We’re thrilled by the response to Éalú so far, and we want to thank everyone for playing! We also want to be upfront about a couple of issues some players have run into. Here's what's been reported and what we've tested, we'll keep this updated as we go. Now fixed!!As of October 13th, 2025, these reported bugs have been patched!An issue with the 5-circles puzzle has been resolved.Players with Ultra Wide displays should no longer have issues when running the game.If you haven't already, update the game to the latest version to receive this fix!What we're working on:Linux & Proton CompatibilityÉalú is currently not stable on Linux or Steam Deck via Proton, and we do not recommend attempting to play it on those platforms at this time. The game was built and tested specifically for Windows PCs.We may explore a Proton-compatible build in the future, but for now, we want to avoid…
- Éalú Release Time Update! - 1 October 2025
Due to some exciting changes in our schedules this week, we decided it would best for us to release Éalú earlier tomorrow! Éalú will now go live on October 2nd, 2025 at:12:00am Pacific Time1:00am Mountain Time2:00pm Central Time3:00am Eastern Time7:00am GMT8:00am Irish TimeWe apologize for the conflicting times! We are so excited to release Éalú, and are extremely eager to hear from you all when you have a chance to play it!Happy puzzling!-Ben
- Dublin ComiCon was amazing! - 12 August 2025
We had an absolutely fantastic time at Dublin ComiCon!!! We really appreciate all of the people who came and either said hello, played the game or both.In addition to the overwhelming positive feedback people shared, we noticed a few ways we can polish the game even further and will be applying those changes as we prepare for launch. It was a privilege to be there among so many other game developers creating wildly creative & fun new games! Here's hoping we can manage to bring Éalú to another event soon, maybe this time on the East Coast of the USA closer to where our developer, Ben, lives!For those who were able to join us this time, what did you think?Also, if you have any questions for us, let us know!
- Éalú exhibiting at Dublin ComiCon Aug 9th & 10th! - 1 August 2025
Éalú's core dev team, Ivan Fisher-Owen (animator) and Ben Orr (developer), will be exhibiting the game in person at Dublin ComiCon on August 9th and 10th. We've been thrilled to hear from some folks already that they'll be stopping by our table to say hello and try out a preview of our game in person! We'll also have a diorama of one of the sets & mouse puppets from the game on display for people to check out in real life. We'll be on the 2nd floor, in the game dev room from open to close both days.Hope to see you there!
- My heart's already been stolen by this stop-motion adventure made out of wood and 'mostly in a garden shed' - 24 July 2025
Éalú, from first time developers Beyond the Bark, starts with a strong premise: You are a mechanical mouse looking to escape a mysterious labyrinth . But its presentation is what really blows the doors down: Nearly everything is made out of wood, and rendered in full-on, stop-motion animation... Read more.
