vgmusicologistSuper-cool little biology and ecosystem simulator. It plays like Stardew Valley, but acts like Sim Life (remember back in the days when Maxis made stuff besides The Sims?). There are some set objectives, but the real meat of the game is found in self-driven experimentation. There’s a deceptively deep level of genetic simulation happening here that my Never-took-a-biology-class self isn’t fully appreciating, but my Let’s-see-what-evolves-in-this-environment self is salivating over.
I will say, the UI doesn’t quite agree with me, and that’s not a minor problem. For a game that conceivably depends on the player setting up conditions and observing results, it seems to lack tools to help them record and analyze findings. Only one organism can be observed at a time, and most of the data this interaction yields has not been particularly meaningful to me, thus limiting the depth of my participation. Again, I’m sure a background in some kind of biology would be useful here, but I also think that with the proper presentation, this game could actually TEACH biology, perhaps without the player even realizing it (zomg, what if it already is…?). The crafting interface is also hampered, with a window that is too small to be useful and which does nothing to alleviate the tedium of dragging and dropping every material and product individually.
However, the game wins a lot of points back with its slow-paced exploratory nature. My inner gardener loves just laying some terrain out and watching how it populates. Though life in the Vilmonic world can pretty much only take the form of “some kind of mushroom” or “some kind of walking thing”, they all have complex, but observable sets of traits that pass from one generation to the next. The devs have also implemented a system of functional scientific naming for each organism, with a genus and a species which helps the player establish some continuity in each ecosystem.