Balance is the key to a healthy gaming diet, and sometimes, I need a gentle walk through ancient Earth to clear my head from all the shooters and action RPGs I spend time with. Thankfully, Astrobotanica, an upcoming survival sim from Space Goblin Studio, offers just such an opportunity.
The upcoming title, which is described as a “relaxed survival” game, is set in an open world prehistoric Earth. As a recently arrived, hyper-intelligent alien, it will be up to us to figure out our surroundings, master the various flora, and find a way to fix our crashed spaceship. Ancient Earth is nice and all, but we are on a mission to get new species of plants back to our people, so we can’t dawdle.
Where things get just a little iffy for us will be that we need a bit more CO2 than is currently available in Earth’s atmosphere, so that will be something we need to figure out as a matter of urgency.
The central gameplay mechanics will revolve around finding, planting, and cultivating our plants, finding that all-important CO2, using our plants to create potions and discovering their many effects, as well as exploring the open world. There will also be some unfriendly animals in the mix, but the developers seem to be siding more with the idea that we should be outsmarting them rather than slaughtering them.
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The aforementioned potions will give us useful ways to get past these animals in Astrobotanica, such as cloaking clouds, goo to slow them down, or putting them to sleep with powerful gasses. Perhaps the most fun element will be the presence of some Neanderthals. We’ll once again be able to help them out by healing their injuries and learning their language.
The game also promises an innovative character development system, and I am very curious to see how that plays out because I really do find it interesting to see how developers in all manner of games build systems that allow us to make our characters feel unique and different.
The idea of spending hours exploring a fun environment with plenty of secrets and not needing to blow anything up is very appealing to me as an excellent foil to the games I play that do tend to veer toward the frenetic and kinetic, and this seems to be right up my alley.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one, and if you are interested, you can prepare for the planned 2025 Early Access release by adding Astrobotanica to your wishlist over on Steam now.