Image credit: Em Stonham for Kyusai/Broken Arms Games/Focus Entertainment
Sci-fi is a genre that often leans into more serious and intense games; whether you’re a horror fan who loves titles like Alien: Isolation, or a strategy fan who’s lost many an hour to Stellaris, it’s not always the coziest or most comforting of genres.
An upcoming game that’s providing a cozier lens to view a dystopian future through is BioEden, a casual, solarpunk management game developed by Broken Arms Games and published by Focus Entertainment. I had the chance to preview the game ahead of its launch, and found it to be enchanting.
Cute space critters
BioEden is a casual, solarpunk management game where you’re on a mission to restore life to a ravaged planet in a dystopian future.
Acting as the representative for one of five Guilds – or for Charles, a cute, flying robot who acts as your guide and key companion during the BioEden demo – you’ll work in a bio dome and build habitats for adorable space critters.
Building a habitat for a creature requires meeting its requirements for living, thriving, and finding a mate, with specific needs like having a water pool, prey in proximity, and specific types of bushes or flora in the area. It’s a simple part of the gameplay loop, but incredibly satisfying.
As you progress, you’ll be able to unlock new creatures and items, even finding critters from different biomes to provide a home for. The requirements for newer animals will be more complex, but you’ll unlock new tools along the way to help make management even easier.
While you will spend a large portion of your time in the dome, you’ll need to venture outside and harvest the planet’s natural resources, using handy machines to suck up metals and ores that you’ll need for building.
Managing electricity for these machines is crucial, too. You’ll need to power your tools and keep them running, which involves a level of strategy in itself; you may only be able to build a finite amount of connecting cables, for example, meaning placement is key.
On top of these elements, you’ll need to manage… well, the elements. The planet itself will react negatively if you build too much or take too many resources from it, increasing your chances of a natural disaster happening.
I loved this addition to the gameplay, as morbid as that may sound, as it added a strong level of realism to the otherwise otherworldly title.
A strong sense of strategy
Despite being in its demo or preview form, BioEden felt intricate and rewarding to explore. It’s a game that I can see myself losing many hours to when it releases in full, largely due to the amount of content it promises.
There were a great number of animals and cute, celestial creatures to build homes for, and I enjoyed the contrast between building pretty habitats and navigating the harsh world outside the protective dome.
Difficulty-wise, the demo wasn’t particularly hard – Charles was incredibly helpful, and I found I could solve most issues easily by simply fiddling with where I placed elements in the overworld.
However, I can see the game getting much more complicated and challenging with its full release. The natural disaster mechanic could prove to be a nightmare on harder difficulties, and I am speculating that there’ll be some late-game critters with exceptionally specific requirements to meet, too.
As someone who enjoys games like Europa Universalis V and Civilization 5, I’m not opposed to games with chaotic interfaces and menus.
However, I found the interface in BioEden to be clean and easy to parse, with plenty of information to dig through if I ever got stuck. This isn’t always the case for management games or sims, so it was refreshing to see this during the demo.
In terms of performance, I didn’t encounter any major issues with BioEden. The game looked delightful during my time with it, and other than a few minor typos in dialogue and menus, there were no notable quirks, flaws, or frame drops.
Fans of management games and celestial adventures should keep an eye out for BioEden; the game is charming and immersive. While it was a relatively cute and cozy experience during the demo, I can see it being intricate and challenging when it releases in full, meaning there’ll be something for all kinds of players to enjoy.
FAQs
BioEden was developed by Broken Arms Games and published by Focus Entertainment.
Yes, BioEden has sci-fi themes, although it’s definitely a solarpunk game. It’s not quite a sci-fi game in the same way that ROUTINE is.
The BioEden demo can take an hour or two, based on my experience with the game, although completionists may spend longer with it.
At the time of writing, a full BioEden release date has not been confirmed yet.
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