underwater

My sherry-swilling, moustache-twirling armchair theorist understanding of ocean-wide coral decline is that addressing it will require a, forgive me, seachange in attitudes towards the “natural” realm we generally position as external and other, ripe for the despoiling – a new way of inhabiting and co-constituting this mote caught in a sunbeam, this stargazing planet from which lamentation is spun, this blithe blue impossibility we (but who are “we”???) call home. Failing that, perhaps we can ask some magic Pixar squid to play underwater SimCity.

Sorry, this is my fairly jaded introduction to Life Below, the latest game from Trolls vs Vikings devs Megapop and Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus publishers Kasedo, which I do genuinely find intriguing in that it is trying to do two, somewhat incompatible things.

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On the one polyp, it wants to educate players about organisms that, as the PR pitch explains, make up 0.01% of the ocean floor, and yet support 25% of ocean life, with input from marine biologists. On the other polyp, it would hate you to get the impression that it’s just here to teach you things. Heavens, no! Life Below is a real-ass strategy management game, whose relatively bizarre pedagogic aspects are kept firmly in check, but hopefully not suffocated by its adherence to genre.

“While the environment and sustainability are important themes, this isn’t ‘edu-tainment’ – this is a proper strategy game,” comments the press release, emphasis theirs. They also want it to be one of “the most accessible city-builders ever”: Life Below is being created in collaboration with disability consultant Arevya and gaming charity Special Effect UK.

In Life Below, you are a representative of Gaia, personification of Earth’s life force. Gaia is often invoked in games with upbeat ecological vibes. I would quite like wholesome gamedevs to spend more time reading about Gaia as originally depicted in Greek myth. In keeping with much of Greek myth, it’s an absolute quagmire. Did you know that Gaia spawned Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, using the hacked-off testicles of her husband, Uranus, after she conspired with her son Cronus to have him carved to pieces, in vengeance for Uranus turning Gaia’s very body into a kind of cyclops petting zoo? Let’s have some of that in games with eco themes, and fewer puppy-eyed jellyfish bois.

Anyway, how it works is that you send out your twinkling octopus children to cultivate a grid of barren seafloor, planting the equivalent of buildings on resource nodes, and using fixtures such as “seagrass lure” to summon a range of aquatic species to your coral city. You must then keep those lifeforms happy and protect them from threats. The latter include biome change, infestations of creatures who threaten to wreck the reef’s equilibrium, and fluctuating algae levels.

The worst nasties, such as oil spills and floating garbage patches, may require the attention of “special wildlife”. Without consulting any Wiki pages, I’m envisaging some kind of plastic-eating bacteria who live inside the mouth of a roving basking shark. Not all the external elements are undesirable: sometimes, a nice whale might swim overhead. I’m not sure what the effect will be on your reef. It’ll be interesting to discover whether Life Below can translate any of its oceanic learnings into novel mechanics, or whether this is just a Little Mermaid skinpack for Cities: Skylines.

The game is out in 2026. The Steam page is here. Look out for a demo during Next Fest in June.

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