A 2 Steam

Earthtongue

According to the internet "earthtongue" is the broad name for any ascomycete fungus. According to Steam, Earthtongue is the name of a small scale ecosystem simulator on an strange world.

In Earthtongue you control the simple plant and animal life on an "alien" world. Simple being the key - fungi, spores, pods, mollusks and insects make up the core of the lifeforms. Each of these has requirements that need to be met in order for it to survive and flourish as well as behaviors that control their interaction with other life. 

The interactions are the core of the game. As you add new species of plant and animal the crossover between them becomes more complex. It starts out simple, grow a few types of fungi here and there across the small bit of world you have mastery over. Add an insect or snail. Then it quickly starts to spiral out of control. Too much of one plant and it starts to over take all the others. Then it turns out the snail cant reach the food and it dies out. Which is bad because they were the food source of a predator insect. Meanwhile you are attempting to get enough rain and nutrients in the soil to keep everything alive...the pressure is real.

But it's also not. There really is no need to be rushing in this game. Sure you are presented with a number of options to make things happen up front and just enough of the starting currency (called interventions) to really get things going, but that's not the pace the game rewards. Plant a fungus and just let the game sit for a bit - see where it grows and how it spreads. Introduce a single bug (all animals in the game are under the "bug" category) and watch how it travels, what it eats and how often it reproduces. It's a relaxing game.

They give you a lot of space as well. You can scroll left and right through a number of screen sized areas and it wraps around simulating a continuous round world. Early on placing a few plants a bit of a distance from each other to observe them separately is a good idea. I never used most of the space given to me, sticking with just a few screens, but as the game doesn't have a finish state per-say if you play long enough with the same world you could fill it all up nicely.

The longer you keep an plant or bug alive the better - after 5000 "years" (called ages) - a diary entry unlocks for the subject and it will give you some more info on their requirements, behavior and life cycle. I sort of like this concept, but would have actually preferred if this info (or at least some of it) was more readily available as you either figure it out on your own after 5000 years or its essential to it's survival but very hard/impossible to glean just from observation. Luckily all these entries are just stored in text files in the game's install folder. Cheating? Maybe - but it lead to me enjoying the game a lot more.

Other than grabbing plant spores and bugs to move them around everything in the game requires payment using the currency of " interventions". You earn these over time and on a rate based on your current total biomass. There is an upper cap to how many you can store but they trickle in at a good rate. Each specific bug and plant has a cost, but you can roll the dice and go for the cheap option of getting a random one, which is good for the first few learning games as it allows you to observe a variety of life without having to wait around. The earth itself requires water and nutrients, which fall from the sky and also cost interventions. You can see the ground dry up and wither (changes color top to bottom) so you you get a good idea of when to apply these.

Earthtongue also allows you terraform the ground square by square up or down, again this costing interventions. Terraforming the terrain allows you to meet the space requirements for certain lifeforms and also allows you to make mountainous separations to stop some bugs from interacting that you would rather not. Unfortunately this is the weakest part of the game - the control it unclear and I spent many intervention just trying to figure out how the terrain changing cursor works - and the cost is awfully high for very little change.  

The game sprinkles you random events such as free nutrients, water, droughts and bug/plant immigration. Sometimes helpful sometimes hindering (or just straight up frustrating such as the meteor shower which does super-vitalize the ground but destroys all the life where it hits first) they are what they are - random.

There is no story to Earthtongue, but along with the bug/plant diary entries, there are a dozen or so that give you a small narrative once you reach certain benchmarks. While initially interesting they are the same every time your start a new world so soon become meaningless.

Earthtongue is an 8/16-bit styled game and other than its total screen resolution, it wouldn't look out of place on a NES. It's not a bad look but the core game uses a lot of dark colors for the ground and sky so that your plants and bugs stick out. The style has a charm to it but I do wish it was a bit clearer - maybe a bit more 32-bit. I am glad though that it doesn't have the grossly over used phone game style catoon graphics.

There is Seam Workshop support for Earthtongue and a couple of people have modified the game with different sprites and lifeforms (the game also comes with a couple build in such as a Halloween themed world). I spent a lot of time playing Earthwood preserve mod which swaps bugs for cute woodland animals and the fungi for trees and bushes. It's a much brighter more vibrant version of the game while having more or less the game game play loops. Modding the game itself is not super hard, the creator gives full instructions and it's mostly sprite swaps and text file editing.

I did not spend a ton of time playing Earthtongue (about 4-5 hours)but I liked what I saw. It's a game that falls into the category of more interesting than fun for me - but sometimes that's enough. I figured that I had my fill of Earthtongue but just today I see a new mod in the workshop setting the game in a lab full of escaped experiments, so I will most likely go back and play that.