For those who speak French, there was an excellent game I played all my childhood: forestia, a computer game from 1998 where you go to discover the forest. You have to take pictures of the animals, collect plants to make a herbarium, and solve the mystery of the forest… Fascinating ! (walkthrough of the game (in French) on YouTube)
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Okay, just remembered one. This is complicated. So, near the end of the 2019/20 school year, I was doing online classes. My science teacher (the same one, by the way, who introduced me to iNat) assigned the class to play a game called Legends of Learning. The main game was fairly boring; I don’t recommend it. But it has a whole bunch of minigames, sorted by category - math, science, etc. Probably hundreds of them. I started playing a few of those, because they were more fun than the main game. My favorite was called Bid For Life. It was really well designed.
You play as 5 animals (one at a time, of course) - I think it was a caribou, a salmon, a bowerbird, some kind of frog, and a duck. As each animal, you’re trying to maximize your reproductive success using whichever strategy that animal has. For example, the salmon is swimming upstream avoiding getting eaten by bears, the bowerbird collects colored objects to decorate his bower, and the duck is leading her ducklings to water while keeping as many as possible from getting eaten along the way. The graphics were surprisingly good, and I found it quite fun.
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If anyone is still looking to play Alba (which I highly recommend), it’s going to be free in the Epic Games Store from November 10 to 17.
Those graphics are super cute! Too bad I only have a Mac…
I remember really wanting SimLife when it came out (I was around 12 or 13) because of its amazing cover and totally thought I could easily just mash up animals to make cool new ones. That was definitely not the case, it was way too complicated for me and had poor graphics - not at all like that sweet cover! I was so disappointed.
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aw yes, simlife. i was obsessed with it for a time as it’s some level of ecology/evolution simulator but like you say it was fraught with problems. It was buggy as heck and froze and crashed often. It had a Thanos-lik emechanism to stop there from being too many animals (since it slows down the game) but since it would eliminate them at random from all species not just the most abundant, any predator would go extinct because they had lower population and couldn’t sustain that. So predators couldn’t exist. Plants that were dispersed by fruit or pollinated by insects couldn’t survive because the algorithm was so simple they always got out competed. All plants became the same life form (i forget if grass or tree). Animals all evolved to be able to fly and eat everything because the energetic penalties for that stuff were too low. It had an auto speciate type thing which was neat cuz it created new organisms of different colors, but it didn’t really work. I tried to get plants to sort by habitat like different ones in high mountains but one plant always took over. Basically, ecology is super complex and a super simplistic simulator leads to super simplistic results. It was fun to try. I still like to play with evolution simulators and ive found some other random ones online that are a bit better, but still actual evolution simulation detailed enough to have a user interface remains elusive. I want to play a game where the opponents evolve to match you, but given the state of simulation technology they’d just evolved into 7000 pound filter feeders that somehow fly and shoot venom. haha.
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Although pretty useless, I find Flap to the Future by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to be fun.
This thread was started in 2019 March.
In 2024 September, a question was asked with the point being that iNaturalist itself is the ultimate computer game based on real ecosystems:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-much-do-you-gamify-inaturalist/55549?
I was OBSESSED with EO1 and EO2 oh my GOSH! Especially loved swimming around with the whales. Unfortunately, we have gotten rid of our Nintendo Wii, and still deeply regret the decision.
lol, maybe I’m (and many MANY other iNatters) are the demographic these games were made for.
Might I add The Sapling and the Bibites to that list? Both indie evolution simulators that I particularly enjoy and are also in alpha stage of development. Plus! They both have devlog type YT channels!
The Sapling: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSapling
The Bibites: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBibitesDigitalLife
If I can make a suggestion…
Rain World really sells itself that it’s a simulation of an ecosystem, but with a more speculative evolution/alien type world, where some animals resemble what we have here on Earth but are not. It’s also set in a post-apocalyptic sort of world, where there are none of the human-equivalent creatures left to upkeep the dilapitating buildings and infrastructure.
You play as a slugcat, a creature that is approximately on the level of a rat or mouse on the food chain, where you eat smaller things, but ALOT of bigger things want to eat you. People have actually called it a “Rat in New York City” simulator lol. The fact that it is set in a world similar but not too similar to ours, really makes you feel like you have just been air dropped into a place you have no idea about, making you ask “what is that?” in a calm, curious voice, to “WHAT THE F- IS THAT???” in a panicked, confused voice when you first play it, exploring it at your own pace. And you have to survive it, which is WAY easier to say than do it.
The AI of the creatures really make this pop from other games though, and is highly praised. Each larger creature types are unique from one another, where they all look different from each other AND they each have traits that make them more or less likely to interact with you different and act different overall to their environment, like if something is aggressive, it will be more likely to attack and kill you and other things if approached, while others of the same creature are shyer, and will try to keep lots of space between you and itself. It really makes the virtual ecosystem feel alive. There are other creatures, where they have a unique ID, but don’t have many differences at all, apart from a handful.
There is also a deep, rather philosophical, overarching story too. The base game really focuses on the “you are a part of an ecosystem”, while the Downpour DLC focuses more on stories of new slugcats and adds more depth to the story from the base game.
And pair this all with a pixellated, 2D platformer.
It is also has a fairly large community. In the modding space (if on Steam), where once you have complete much of the things you can do, you can download them and feel lost in a new world all over again, or play with new mechanics. As a fandom space, in my disappointment, the speculative evolution/biology aspect is a lot less explored and prevelent than what I would have expected. That isn’t to say it isn’t. You just have to follow the right people, but when you do, it’s so cool to see their interpretation of the creatures and the world mechanics.
If you feel like this is something you want to play, I have to warn you, DO NOT think this game will hold your hand. Many people tried it for the first time, only to put it down because it was so hard. The only tutorial is on the basic controls, like jumping, throwing picking up items etc. and that’s it. You even have to master those, like you are a newborn, walking on your feet for the first time. The rest, you have to play around for yourself. There is no power-up except for one, which only allows you to interact with the lore. The only way of getting better is through what you have learned. I would even say you have to be in a mindset where you are open to losing over and over and over again, without making much progress during a session. Look at it from an experimental point of view, like “if I throw this item, does it do something in this situation?” etc.
It’s also one of those games that you can only get the best experience out of only once, on your first playthrough. I would recommend to actually play it for the first time, rather than watch a playthrough. (although maybe watch an episode 1 or 2, to get the gist, if it’s something you do want to play.) I wish all the time when I play it now, that I have played it completely blind the first time, struggle through parts that I knew what to do with due to a playthrough I watched to get the gist of the game. I feel like it is worth the experience in the end, with however much I did get to experience.
Dang, I’ve been rambling on. I just really love this game. :)
I only have the Google Play Store, and a Nintendo Switch. Does anyone with just those have any ecosystem based game recommendations? I check regularly but many of these games are disappointing.
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I don’t think so, since I can like posts in closed topics. But what do I know, I’m not a Moderator.