BioEden Preview
If you thought the global climate apocalypse was all raging fires, scorching temperatures, and obliterated coastlines, think again. You can turn that frown upside down in BioEden, where your task is to turn a poisoned world into a paradise, one plot of land at a time. Sure, most of Earth’s animal species have gone extinct, but no worries! In BioEden, you can re-populate the world with all sorts of new, inventive, and adorable critters.
Under the Dome
BioEden’s gameplay consists of a few interconnected loops. You have a dome, which acts as a habitat and hatchery for animal species that need a particular biome. To get an animal to appear, thrive, and reproduce, you need to terraform or add specific vegetation to the dome’s environment. As you start to add new species, you’ll see that requirements can sometimes overlap. For example, your second species might need to predate on the first species.
At some point, your little dome will start to run out of resources, which necessitates venturing out into the seriously degraded world. This is the second loop, exploring and building machines to gather resources, refine them, or help create conditions for new species. You build new domes in new biomes and connect them into a network of different habitats.
Pick Your Guild and Build
In the full game, there will be five Guilds. Although each Guild approaches the task uniquely, they all share the same goal of saving the planet. One Guild might be focused on building, another on a deep understanding of biology. Which Guild you choose will give you a particular tech/upgrade tree, so each experience will be different.
In the demo, players are guided by a robot named Charles, who helpfully provides missions and the steps to complete them. BioEden starts simply enough but it’s clear that, between all the different species, their requirements, the technology, and the biomes, there’s quite a bit of depth. There’s a fail-state, too, in that you can overbuild the planet and exploit its meager resources all over again.
The Future Will be Cozy-fied
A good cozy game lets you putter around without stressing you about deadlines, while still giving you enough structure so your time isn’t completely aimless. At least from the demo, it looks like BioEden has a good grasp on this important aspect of the genre. Goals are broken down into bite-sized bits. There usually isn’t a time-sensitive task hanging over your head.
Whether it’s illustrating the verdant green landscape under the dome or the fiery hellscape outside it, BioEden has a colorful, vibrant, stylized look that maybe takes a bit of the sting out of eco-collapse. Its critters are cute, too, sort of vaguely adjacent to Pokémon.
There are plenty of games that posit an apocalypse filled with pain and suffering. BioEden takes a different approach, one filled with color, hope, and cozy vibes. Maybe our terrible stewardship of the Earth isn’t the end, but an opportunity for a fresh start, new forms of life, and different approaches with one end goal. That might be a little too serious. In any case, the BioEden demo definitely hints at an intriguing blend of cozy game and builder.
***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***
