Dunedin's Balancing Monkey Games went from a back-room hobby project to 150,000+ sales with Before We Leave. Its sequel puts your whole city on the back of a moody, sentient Space Whale, skipped Early Access entirely, and is out now on Steam, Epic and PC Game Pass.
Some studios grow up in glass towers in Seattle or Montréal. Balancing Monkey Games grew up in a small study at the back of a house in Dunedin. Nine years later, the Ōtepoti studio has just launched its second game, Beyond These Stars, a city builder where your whole civilisation lives on the back of a giant, sentient Space Whale. It’s out now on PC, it’s published by the same people behind Manor Lords and Against the Storm, and it’s one of the most interesting things to come out of the New Zealand games scene this year.
Here’s where the Monkeys came from, how their first game sold well over 150,000 copies, and why you should be paying attention to a whale named Kewa.
The studio is Sam and Anna Barham. Sam has been a software developer for more than 20 years. He started at Dunedin’s Animation Research Limited, working on the kids’ TV show Squirt, and later wrote educational software at Education Perfect. Anna managed the Dunedin South Medical Centre and holds a master’s in psychology.
According to The Spinoff, the couple had a deal: once Anna finished her thesis, it was Sam’s turn to spend his evenings and weekends in the study. In 2017, between a full-time job and being a dad, he started building a city builder as a hobby, with friends and family as his testers. That’s where the name comes from. The balancing act was the whole point.
The game entered the NZGDA’s Kiwi Game Starter in 2018 under the working title “Before” and only made the finals. Losing turned out fine. The entry caught the eye of an investor, who put up enough money for Sam to quit his job, go full-time for a year and hire some artists. In 2019 he came back and won the thing outright, taking home the $25,000 prize. A few years later the studio was sponsoring the same competition. Good on them.
Before We Leave launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive on 9 May 2020, right in the middle of New Zealand’s first COVID lockdown. Your Peeps crawl out of underground bunkers after centuries in hiding and have to rebuild civilisation on a hex-tile world. They know how to grow potatoes and not much else. There are no wars and no armies. The only threats are pollution, your own bad planning and the odd hungry Space Whale.
It worked. The Otago Daily Times reported 50,000 sales by December 2020. Anna left the medical centre to become managing director, the studio hired its first staff and moved into an office in South Dunedin, and in 2021 Team17 signed on to take the game wider:
By March 2022 the studio said it had sold more than 150,000 copies, plus thousands more players through Humble Choice and Game Pass. Before We Leave picked up the Excellence in Audio Pav at the 2020 NZ Games Festival and Freeplay’s Across the Ditch award in 2021.
It wasn’t a masterpiece, mind. It sits at 72 on Metacritic and “Mostly Positive” on Steam (about 78% of 1,700-odd reviews). The common complaint, Polygon’s included, was that it got stressful as you expanded: more islands and planets meant more pollution, more unhappy Peeps and more juggling, and the “cosy” vibe could turn into spreadsheet stress. But it was charming, it was different, and for a first game out of a Dunedin back room, it punched well above its weight.
Before We Leave had Space Whales as the threat. Beyond These Stars flips that around: now you live on one.
After some uncertain times, your Peeps decide to stop hiding from the whales and settle on the back of Kewa, a lonely Space Whale drifting through the universe. When you arrive Kewa’s back is mostly barren rock, apart from a little patch of green by the water. You turn it into a home.
Development started in 2022, with Hooded Horse as publisher and funding support from the NZ government through Dunedin’s Centre of Digital Excellence (CODE). A free demo landed in June 2024 and got a big update in November 2025. The studio overhauled the Peep portraits after demo players said they didn’t fit the art style. The game passed 100,000 wishlists along the way and showed up at PAX Aus this year.
The plan was always Early Access. Then in March the studio said its systems were further along than expected and skipped Early Access to go straight to 1.0. The release date slipped exactly one day, from 15 to 16 October US time, which is Saturday 17 October here. Not exactly the delay saga we’re used to.
It’s also already picked up hardware at home. At the 2026 NZ Games Festival Pavs, Beyond These Stars took both Excellence in Design and Excellence in Accessibility. The team behind it is a core of eight in Dunedin, plus freelancers. Before We Leave composer Benedict Nichols is back on the soundtrack, the narration is voiced by Tuki Laumea, and the game is translated into 14 languages.
The early buzz is good. Saving Content gave it a 4 (“Awesome”) in a pre-launch review, praising Kewa as a setting, the environmental systems and the lush art. Its knocks were the lack of voice acting, a clunky, retro-looking communications screen and cutscene art the reviewer didn’t love. Early Steam players call it beautiful, smooth and a big quality-of-life jump over Before We Leave. The one negative so far says the logistics are confusing, with goods piling up at production buildings and no obvious way to move them on, which was also a gripe from the demo.
Full disclosure: we haven’t put our own 40 hours into the full game yet, so this is a first look, not a scored review. Here’s where we’re at.
The hook is brilliant. “City builder on the back of a living whale that has its own moods” is the kind of idea you get one shot at, and Balancing Monkey has taken it. Most city builders treat the map as a static board. Here the map is a character you can hurt, please and annoy, and that’s a smarter way to make sustainability a game mechanic than another pollution meter.
Skipping Early Access was a ballsy call. Hooded Horse built its name on Early Access, and plenty of studios would have happily sold a half-finished game for two years. This lot reckoned theirs was ready and shipped it. We respect that. It also means there’s no excuse if the late game has the same grind and fiddly logistics that dragged Before We Leave down. The demo’s biggest complaint was logistics, and launch day already has a review saying the same thing. That’s the one to watch.
The PC-only, Windows-only launch stings a bit for a studio whose first game ended up on everything. No Mac build is a step backwards. Still, with Team17’s port history behind them, we’d be surprised if console versions don’t follow.
Mostly, though, this is a Dunedin studio that went from a back-room hobby to a Hooded Horse 1.0 launch with two NZ awards already on the shelf. Kiwi games don’t get anywhere near enough attention, even at home, and this is exactly the sort we should be backing. It’s on Game Pass, so if you’ve got PC Game Pass there’s literally no excuse not to have a go. If you don’t, grab the demo first. If it clicks, NZ$32 for a cosy city builder from down the road is a pretty easy sell.
Are you setting up on Kewa this weekend? Tell us how your whale’s holding up in the comments, or come and share your city in the GetRekt Discord. Bonus points if you manage to make Kewa properly grumpy.
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