Earthtongue

Seeing as I have about 10x -30x the hours of any other reviewer in playing this game, I guess it's time that I say something about it. Lots of people have already described what it is. I'm going to say a little about getting the most out of the game. First, think of it more as a 'Garden' that you just leave running in the background, and come back and tend to every so often. For me, that's about every 20mins or so. At first, you need to unlock all of the descriptions for the different plant and bug types, so that yo know how they interact... what the feed on, how they reproduce. To do this, you need to keep that plant/bug alive for 5000s straight. I'd recommend focussing on the Moulds first (OK, some of them are Carnivirous, worry about them a bit later, then) and pretty well ignore bugs altogether early game. Why? because The wrong bug can easliy wipe out an entire species or 10 of Mould. If you have a Mould or bug that keeps dying, for no reason, it's probably Carnivorous, and has no food. Try reintroducing it once you have a bigger eco system running. I have yet to create a balanced, self sustaining system. It involves quite a lot more than you might think, actually. Right no I am in the middle of Terraforming to create separate Mini-Biomes, so that I can introduce several complementarty species that can rely on each other, and hopefully not wipe each other out. This is the appeal of this game, it's preject with a view to the long term, kind of like making Bonsai. It's always interesting when the planet decides to throw something random in the mix, though.

I suddenly found myself in the care of a planet in some far reach of space. The more time I spent with this planet, the more attached I grew to its inhabitants. I remember an era of pure blue, the mushrooms and beetles spanning miles and miles. Few could dispute their claim to this world. Little by little, the yellow slime took over... Then the spiders came. It barely resembled the world I once knew. With them, the world had taken a different shape. I wanted all creatures to share this planet. I'll admit, I've interfered a lot. I just want to see them thrive. This is the task I've charged myself with. Whether I achieve it -- if the powers that be allow me to achieve it -- is a different story... But I won't give up.

Pretty cool and unique little gem here. I've enjoyed watching over my world and observing it grow while intervening where necessary. At first my I didn't have much but managed to grow an environment with about 7 or 8 different species. Unfortunately I wasn't managing it well and eventually saw my ecosystem nearly collapse. with only two fungi left and all my bugs gone. However, I manged to bounce back. Once I got a grasp on how the various bugs and fungi interacted, I soon found myself with a healthy enviornment with mushrooms and fungi, plenty of roaches and beetles, mantis to eat them, saw my first spider come in and grow into a little spider society a little away from my mountains with my mushrooms and flies. It bounced back completely, much more diverse and more individual creatures and it felt like I had accomplished something. Earthtongue has a nice balance of being able to interact with the world enough to guide it, but you're not expected to micromanage every single thing. Sometimes I would move a mantis over to a high populous area, or make sure my beetles could thrive elsewhere while their numbers increased, and of course the interventions that tick off every number of years. I feel like a gentle guiding hand to this world and it's a unique experience that I recommend trying!

Earthtongue is a fungal ecosystem simulator. I bet you've never heard of that before. Well... unless you were a mycologist. Earthtongue is unique in that it's less of a game and more of a simulator with limited interactions. It still has some minor goals (unlocking journal entries) but everything is largely freeform and open-ended for how you decide on what you want to do with your little fungus world. A fully diverse ecosystem is a thing of beauty and playing Earthtongue will teach you to appreciate the balance such an system requires. It'll show you just how fragile the ecosystem around you -- just like on this simulated planet -- really can be. While its a great little simulator, and I can easily recommend Earthtongue, I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Its for people who liked games similar to Mountain or watching Breve 3D Evolution simulations. Earthtongue is for people who like watching aquariums full of fish, or ant farms. People who want more interaction with their simulation games -- such as those who play Dwarf Fortress, or SimCity -- probably won't enjoy this nearly as much.

Good in theory, and I enjoy the way the ecosystem has a lot of complex behaviors in it. It's just not quite sure what it's trying to be. A desktop aquarium/terrarium would need to be reasonably interesting to look at, no matter what adjustments the player makes or how long they leave it alone -- but, Earthtongue requires constant maintenance by a skilled hand in order to keep your ecosystem going. A management / sim game would need to have a reasonable amount of challenge -- but, your actions would need to have easily understood effects (creature descriptions / names / behaviors are not explained until after you've had them on-world alive for a very large amount of time -- you have to guess it all by observation), and your actions would need to be the determining factor in whether you succeed or fail. In Earthtongue, new species are added to your sandbox at random, every few minutes -- so you can't set up any kind of specialized environment, random things you might not want (like predators, animals in general, invasive species, etc) constantly invade, especially if you aren't monitoring it 24/7. There are other genres that this game sort of fails to hit the mark for, but those are the big ones. I guess my #1 problem is that the game forces you to micromanage to keep everything from dying off, but it doesn't Let you micromanage because you have a limited amount of moves per minute. I may keep playing to poke around figuring out what all the creatures do. If I can find a decent write-up of how the ecosystem works though, that'll be the end of my interest. On the plus side, it's very pretty, very peaceful, and the first time I accidentally sent a meteor shower I didn't want was Very Memorable.

[h1] Game where you drop meteorites and use different elementals to terraform surface of the planet. You collect points which can be used to seed new lifeforms. Baically gameplay is very shallow and almost non existent. It's more like some niche novelty than actual game. I run game in background to discover all lifeforms hence so many play hours. [/h1]

Self-sufficient ecosystem generator, zen-style clicker game (that you non-click not to spoil the balance), an ever-absent God simulator, a process to run in the background forever - I just love this thing, where pixellated darwinian race for survival looks at first like a mess of colors, but whoever learns to distinguish the creatures' ways of life will observe epic triumphs and tragedies in vivo. Really, not every active game captures my attention for tens of minutes like this one, and surely not every involved gameplay gets me so emotionally connected. At some point you get to know facial expressions of worms when they feed, then you try to help a strange shroom to inhabit a hole naturally separated from a swarm of hungry bugs... Basically it's just a tomagochi gadjet upscaled in which you can do interventions every so often, but they barely do any good - just small turbulence whirls on the face of eternity, the best way to play is just look at the screen in the evening and maybe make bets on species to make it through the night, then turn off the monitor, and get totally surprised after sleep. 10 TOTALLY UNJUST species extinctions out of 10!!!

I originally played this game on Itch.io and really loved it. The pixel art is lovely and the music is soothing :) There aren't any tutorials or instructions, although there are journal entries with specific information on each fungus/insect that are unlocked after a species survives for a long enough time. This means that the player will need to observe the behaviours of the insects and fungi in order to determine how to properly care for them. Some are herbivores, some carnivores - some fungi even eat bugs. Balancing the ecosystem is both challenging and rewarding. A species can easily die off if they over-consume their food source, for example. Some insects are bad at climbing terrain and may get stuck in an area with no food. The player is given Intervention points which replenish over time, and allow them to add insects or fungi, change the weather, or alter the terrain. Choosing a random insect, fungi, or weather effect to add is significantly less expensive than choosing something specific, but of course the player receives less control over what will be added to the ecosystem when it is randomized. Insects can be picked up and moved by the player, allowing them the option to manually balance the ecosystem. Fungi, however, cannot be moved. Earthtongue can be addictive to play, but also fun to just leave running while I do other things. It's exciting to come back and see what has grown, which populations have survived, or which species have gone completely extinct ;)

Un absoluto si, al principio no entendía nada y después estaba muy al pendiente de cada pixel como si mi vida se fuera en ello(? Por alguna razón me recordó a rain world pero en versión idle, y mucho menos estresante, claro está, porque vos sos todos y nadie a la vez, o bien podrías jugar a encarnar el Caos mismo, para gustos colores. Explicar cualquier cosa sobre este juego sería spoiler, es corto, se disfruta en total desconocimiento y sin guias, especial para nerdies curiosos.

A     Virtual Terrarium for    Bug Touchers and   Fungi Freaks.