Vilmonic
Vilmonic is a sandbox game which focuses on the evolution of alien species called anims; they adapt to environments, go extinct, go through periods of population peaks… Anims change shape as they try to find a way to fulfil their role in a niche, when faced with competition from other anims. I have high hopes for this game, and I believe the developer will continue to grow it.
Vilmonic for me is a concept game, it is still in beta as I write this, the game has potential to inspire many into pursuing perhaps even careers in genetics, or simply educating people in times where evolution has been considered controversial. It has a friendly aesthetic for new users, the control schemes can be somewhat clunky.
– Real player with 151.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Crafting Creature Collector Games.
The ONLY modern A-Life game you can do a successful Wolfing Run.
For the young ones, that is a term coined by the Creatures series community, which has been on the net since 1999.
Wolfing is leaving your artificial lifeforms to their own devices for several hours, maybe while at work or sleeping, and coming back to a population that has changed, persisted, and survived natural selection factors. Mods are needed for Creatures 2’s bugs but the three games can theoretically support a “wild” population of creatures without player input for extended periods.
– Real player with 30.8 hrs in game
Blacksmith Village
Let’s pay off the debt by running the smithy left behind by my grandfather.
Healing game to grow a small forge.
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Collect recipes and make various equipment. Equipment can be crafted without a recipe.
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Let’s accept requests from customers visiting the forge and receive rewards. If intimacy increases, may something good happen?
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Send your pet to the dungeon to get the materials you need to make equipment. If you’re lucky, you might find a hidden treasure?
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Let’s enjoy a healing life while feeling the little happiness of decorating the smithy.
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When you pay off your grandfather’s debt, various events occur.
Read More: Best Crafting Relaxing Games.
On My Own
I wish the game would let me know that I should have some food prepared between biomes, before telling me I starved to death on my way to said biome and then deleting my save file of 3 hours. I also got really focused on finding foxes and forgot to eat. I had plenty of food, but then I “starved to death” and another save file of 5 hours was deleted. I understand it’s trying to be realistic, you should think of this intuitively, you should figure it out, etc. but forcing a complete restart after hours of tedious gathering and crafting just feels like a slap in the face.
– Real player with 16.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Crafting Relaxing Games.
just a garbage game.
Graphics 4/10 - kind of cute and retro.
Interface 1/10 - Feels like a bad phone port. it’s very clunky.
Music 2/10 - it gets unbelievably repeative hearing the same loop.
Guidance 3/10 - It doesn’t hold your hand. It pushes you from behind and laughs. then ignores you forever.
Saves 0/10 - Manual saves are overwritten by autosaves making M. Saves pointless.
Overall 2/10 - I’d return it if I bought it specifically. but it came in a bundle. I’ll check back in a month and edit this review if things improve. Right now? DO NOT BUY.
– Real player with 7.2 hrs in game
Survivor Island
Its a small, short, and fun game. the tired system dosen’t seem to work.
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
Dev wont even fix two broken achievements which was my only reason to buy this ‘game’
– Real player with 4.0 hrs in game
Aka
Ride a bike, watch the clouds, swim in the hot springs under a blossom tree… or take a nap on a giant capybara
Experiment with a farming system inspired by permaculture.
Gather resources to craft shelters, tools, props, food…
Explore different biomes, from cloud forests to snowy mountains.
Honeycomb
Day by day, technological progress changes not only the lives of people, but also the smallest life forms on our planet. In our project, we would like to direct your attention to a very important issue of our times - the extinction of wild bees, which despite their tiny size, has a huge impact on the entire Earth’s ecosystem.
Greetings explorer! You are going to spend quite some time in the laboratory - don’t forget to go on a research expedition into the unknown. A world full of exploration, building and crafting awaits you!
You are the last hope of Earthlings.
Research both flora and fauna - standard scanning is not enough. Explore the world of genetics and experiment with various possibilities to even create a new plant genera. Mutating plants and species promotes new raw material discoveries and blueprints. Experiment to master new technologies and settle your base in new environments.
This new world can be beautiful but dangerous as well - an undiscovered fruit or a contact with previously unknown, even the most innocuous-looking animals can provoke a disease, for which you’ll have to invent a cure. Some of them are tamable, some can only be feared and fled from - there is only one way to find out.
For optimal productivity, an explorer’s life has to be comfortable! Take care of your “workplace”, create the needed conditions by yourself and even decorate your base. Build drones, mobile laboratories, habitat, and research stations. Don’t stop there - create multiple stations in optimal locations, safety, weather or raw material wise, and ensure safe travel between them - hoverboard is the best way to start.
The planet stores the secret key that may help you in saving the earth and its inhabitants. Remember! It is up to you how you use that knowledge.
The Sapling
Very reminisce of Spore, but focus on natural selection and ecology which Spore seriously lacked. I completed all the current scenarios. So a 4 out 5 for me, and must buy for anyone who want an ecological game.
In a world filled with in-your-face tutorial, Sapling tutorial teach to basic and then allow the player learn the rest thru trying out all the functions and hover-over information. A serious plus.
The scenarios are both pleasing and challenging puzzles, and as I said before the scenarios teach the player how to use the game thru experimentation over in-your-face hand-holding flood of pop-up tutorials that plague the gaming world. Even once you completed all scenarios, the sandbox is actually challenging and very satisfying despite the fact everything is unlocked. With mutation and time-skip for sand-box, it allow you is more accurate natural selection.
– Real player with 22.0 hrs in game
I really love this game, I also love creating creatures to play as, or to just simply observe them evolving! Its fun to see how they would do in the wild trough a simulation. Though, this game is small and all, I’d want to be able to use a brush tool to change moisture and temperature of places, with it automatically changing the color and creating puddles or mud, maybe even a coloring tool to give the ground some color! *With this there should be an option to make the lakes not be automatically created. But also, we should be able to create our own lakes, so we can make a swamp-like environment for our creations to survive in! But really, overall I’d rate this game an 8.5/10 , one of the problems I have is lag, even with a good pc and low settings, probably due to many things moving at once all the time and the crashing. Another issue is the time cap I encountered, everything froze and I could only get past it trough a time skip, which took a whole 7 minutes to be done. But I enjoy this game alot, despite the issues. Hope you guys can develop this game to be one of the best simulation games ever!
– Real player with 19.9 hrs in game
Deiland: Pocket Planet
Deiland: Pocket Planet is a relaxing farming adventure where you will have to take care of your tiny planet. Farm, craft and fight monsters to make your home a special place and help others with their quest.
Discover the story of Arco in this single-player experience, a tale about growing up, helping others and revealing the secrets that lie on the heart of your planet. We’ve crafted a relaxing game, with a strong narrative and a cast of diverse characters for you to meet.
Customize your planet with trees, plants, crops, flowers or structures, and take care of your farm animals.Discover how the whole planet changes through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Each crop will only be available in the right seasons.
Play and relax. Smooth and cute graphics as well as relaxing soundtrack to ease up the bustling everyday routine with over 12 characters to meet and befriend and more than 100 quests to uncover the secrets that the heart of your planet holds.
Erzurum
In short - a quick and dirty ripp-off of The Long Dark - about 5% of the fun, it only deserves 5% of the price also.
Its only WASD - no directional key control remaping except for looking around…I don’t like or use WASD controls..also there is no strafing.
Made in Unreal engine with so many bugs I thought it initially must be a Unity game.
Very large single map (maybe too big?) - will take long time to get around. Graphics always popping in right in front of you. Nice looking environment but weather is terrible at best - its like someone turned on the snow or off again - its instant with no warning and too simplistic. My own game is far better than this.
– Real player with 28.6 hrs in game
Played enough to complete the main story, not really interested in the other game modes (Kill 20 bears in 24 hrs, survive 7 days -25 degrees Celsius) where it just feels empty. Visually, it look great, especially the high-res textures, which almost make the environment seem real enough. Once you go third person, you realize the dev is using a character model from one of their other games. Main character doesn’t look horrible, but definitely does not fit with the game, looks like the guy from The Division with that iconic jacket he wears lol. The survival aspect felt okay for a game this big. By the end was able to stay warm using the best animal pelt I had found. I really did not have much trouble at all with food or water, for it was everywhere, though by the end I started to worry about not being over-encumbered. Seeing the other games the devs have made, this one seems like their best one in my opinion, I suppose it captures the Turkish feel(never been there), and the high-res textures really made all the objects pop-out(the assets placed all over the world, I mean). Overall, for a small-time game, this is good for killing the time and enjoying the environment when there’s boredom in the real world. Edit: hope the devs can make a game better than this in the future.
– Real player with 8.1 hrs in game
Arid
Arid is a completely free student project created by potential graduates of the Breda University of Applied Sciences located in the Netherlands. There they cater to international students offering both bachelor and masters degrees in both media and game technology. Priding their expertise in the Houdini Engine for Unity among other things. Their focus is on creating AAA games and some students manage to progress even further eventually working for companies such as Ubisoft and Guerrilla.
Arid is a ‘unrealistic’ desert survival game. I say unrealistic because you literally starve, drink and need shut eye constantly even on the easiest of settings. The survival reminders are relentless and before long you’ll be praying that the game give you at least a moment’s rest so that you can gather yourself.
– Real player with 32.2 hrs in game
For a free game, Arid is really good, in my opinion. It has some bugs here and there and could use some polish in some areas, but so do lots of games. I had it crash a couple of times, both times connected to saving, but it turned out the save had worked anyway so it was alright.
Overall, without having ever been to the Atacama (and bearing in mind it’s been enhanced for video game purposes), it felt properly punishing. I’ve wished other games that featured large desert areas had something like the sun exposure mechanic; on the hardest difficulty in this, when there’s no UI element to tell you what your exposure is, the sun is very scary. You end up reapplying clay obsessively, and scuttling from one shaded area to another, and doing a lot of your work at night. I also enjoyed the mechanic of finding dirty water and having to filter it. Other games have similar things, but this felt very natural, part of the daily tasks.
– Real player with 23.3 hrs in game