TL;DR: You may notice most other reviews praise the concept of this game, rather than the game itself. There's a reason for that.
This is a fantastic concept, it's just executed very poorly. My playtime didn't feel like I was in control of growing a cell culture, it felt like watching random things happen for no explainable reason, with little to no control over any of it. I don't actually know if that's because everything really is completely random, or if the lack of any solid explanation of what's happening just makes it feel random. For example: The game tells you to use archaea to clear hydrogen peroxide. My experience was something like:
1. Spawn a protocell near the hydrogen peroxide, but not in it, because protocells die in it; then split the protocell into haploids (which are apparently unaffected by hydrogen peroxide for some reason)
3. Wait for the haploids to be ready to reproduce (which seems to be completely random), and hope they don't randomly swim too far away in the meantime
4. Turn a pair of ready-to-reproduce haploids into a single archaea cell, after buying the RNA from a menu
5. Hope the archaea cell actually goes into the hydrogen peroxide cloud (which they rarely seem to do), rather than swimming in literally any other direction
6. Wait for it to swim around the cloud for some random amount of time, at which point I guess the cloud is supposed to dissipate (though I don't think I ever saw that happen).
Your involvement in this whole process will be hitting about 6 buttons. Everything else is waiting and hoping things happen. Not only do you not control whether those things happen, but you don't even know why, when, or how they happen. Now, you could spawn a whole bunch of cells to potentially increase your chances, but that means many will go wandering off-screen, doing who knows what. I got my first eukaryote off-screen from, I assume, random mutation. I can only assume that means haploids will reproduce without player input, but every time I've watched them to see it happen, they just float around until one dies of "natural cell death". Maybe cells only act independently while off-screen, though that doesn't make it better: it means not only can you not control anything useful directly, but interesting things only happen when you're not looking.
The progression system is similar. There are various "levels", each level unlocking new types of RNA and tools. The only way to increase your level is by completing objectives like "create 6 protocells". But there is no indication of how, when, or why objectives are given - again, they pop up seemingly at random. I played for 20 minutes without getting a single objective, which meant I couldn't make any progress towards the next level to unlock anything, and had to just keep spawning the same two types of cells hoping something would happen.
And as for creating a "functioning ecosystem" - that doesn't seem to happen at all. Mitochondria are aerobic, so they're supposed to die when not in oxygen - but mine seemed perfectly capable of swimming around outside the oxygen clouds created by cyanobacteria without issue. I never saw one die from lack of oxygen. Even if they did, creating those clouds in the first place (ie, actually affecting the "ecosystem") is, again, totally random. In theory, cyanobacteria will create oxygen when in sunlight, but how long a cyanobacteria has to be in sunlight before creating a cloud seems totally random; and the length of time the cloud lasts before dispersing is equally random. Most of my cyanobacteria just floated around doing nothing - but one time, a newly-created cyanobacteria immediately spawned an oxygen cloud (for some reason), which lasted about 3 seconds before dissipating. Meanwhile, there were other oxygen clouds out in the middle of nowhere, with no cells of any kind in sight - meaning the cells that created them either died or wandered off, while the cloud persisted seemingly indefinitely.
Lastly, beyond the general gameplay and progression, technical/UI issues include:
- Lag when opening/closing menus (which, given that's about 80% of player involvement, is kind of a problem)
- There are, for some reason, two separate tutorial explanations (the actual tutorial, and your "AI" assistant), which both pop up at the same time and explain basically the exact same things, and one of which blocks your ability to click anything else
- Moving around the screen takes some getting used to, and is EXTREMELY sensitive - not sure why they didn't just use the typical WASD. When you inevitably click too close to the edge of the screen and your view goes flying off to the edge of the "map", it's almost impossible to figure out where you were. You can use TAB to cycle through your cells, but again, the camera "centering" takes a long time and feels laggy, and trying to get back to a particular area by cycling through potentially dozens of cells one at a time is pretty frustrating.
- When something happens (e.g., a cell dividing on its own - no idea why or when this happens), little notifications will pop up on screen ("meiosis detected"), directly over the cell in question - and nowhere else. There is no sidebar or tracking system to notify you of things happening off-screen, or indicator to highlight which cell had done something if/when they move. You only know things have happened if you're already looking at them.
In summary: this "game" fails as a game and as a hands-off observational simulation. Taking 10 minutes to imagine the cool game that could be based on such an awesome concept will likely be more enjoyable than actually playing this. Watching microscope videos of cells on youtube will appear less random, and often include a voice-over explaining what's happening, making it less confusing. The only positive aspect of this is its concept, so I cannot recommend it in its current state.
