Koi Players create their own Japanese-inspired koi ponds, gradually adding water, shoreline, vegetation, water lilies, koi, lanterns, and other features. Players alternate between acquiring resources and cards and using them to...
Mycelia Mycelia is a deck-building board game with a natural theme: mushrooms. Each player has their own game board containing 20 dewdrops. You win the game by getting rid of all...
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most popular Nintendo game series. You play as Link in the open world of Hyrule and try to...
Netelland Netelland, created by composer Eva Beunk and installation artist Adrian Gutzelnig in collaboration with the Gaudeamus Festival and Stichting Op Wacht, is an immersive, site-specific performance set in the speculative...
Spirit Island Spirit Island is widely recognized not just as a well designed cooperative strategy game but as a deliberate counter-narrative to the neo-colonial exploration and exploitation gameplay inherent in classic games...
Hero of the Kingdom (series) While not explicitly framed as an ‘ecogame’, the Hero of the Kingdom series (developed by Lonely Troops) offers an interesting and sometimes surprising representation of human-nature relations in a fantastical...
Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest Released in 2020 by the Polish indie studio Different Tales (co-founded by former The Witcher designers), Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest is a narrative-driven visual novel RPG....
Blue Planet (TTRPG series) Originally published in 1997 by Biohazard Games and recently revived with Blue Planet: Recontact, Blue Planet is widely considered a pioneering and successful example of ‘hard’ eco-science fiction in the...
Eco Lifestyle Careers and NPCs (The Sims 4) In the base game of The Sims 4 withe the Eco Lifestyle expansion, the environmental systems sometimes feel more like a top-down macro-level simulation. The ecological footprint meter and regulatory...
Laundry Day (The Sims 4) The Sims 4: Laundry Day Stuff pack emerged out of a community vote originally pitched under the working title “Eco Living”. While the more systemic, macro-level mechanics like politics (e.g....
Global Warming (Factorio) The Factorio base game already tentatively addresses ecological impact. By default, it treats environmental degradation as a localized trigger for hostile environmental reactions, i.e. if players pollute, trees absorb the...
The Edge of Water BigMood’s indie adventure The Edge of Water avoids mechanics of environmental exploitation for gameplay systems built around stewardship, multi-species kinship, and ecological harmony. The game works most visibly by defamiliarizing...
Machine Dreams: Rainforest Refik Anadol’s Machine Dreams: Rainforest, the headlining debut exhibition at Anadol’s Los Angeles museum Dataland, is a highly ambitious attempt at using AI and immersive projection techniques in the service...
Climate Cooldown Climate Cooldown is a cooperative educational board game designed for 2–4 players (though the game is scalable for larger groups in classrooms). Over the course of up to five rounds,...
Post Growth Toolkit: The Game Developed by the art and research collective Disnovation.org, Post Growth Toolkit: The Game is a tactical intervention into how we conceptualize the climate crisis. Most commercial environmental simulation games like...
Thrifty Business Thrifty Business by Spellgarden Games is not explicitly framed as an ‘ecogame’ – neither by players nor the developers – but it has some interesting characteristics for climate communication and...
Heatwave HeatWave by Perimeter Games, already announced in 2020 and potentially in development limbo, is a non-linear sandbox guerrilla group simulator that frames global temperatur escalation not just as an environmental...
Silt While often categorized by players primarily within the horror genre, the indie game Silt foregrounds environment and ecological systems as central components of its gameplay. Rather than treating the setting...
Plastic Island Plastic Island, developed by the Indonesia-based “Ecogames” collective, is an educational board game that thematizes combating plastic pollution. Participants clean and upcycle trash, enhancing the ocean’s health; the game (like...
Mulaka Developed by the Mexican studio Lienzo, Mulaka is a 3D action-adventure game that focuses on Indigenous storytelling. Set in a poly-poly rendition of the landscapes of northern Mexico, the game...
Future Energy Future Energy, designed by Emanuele Ornella and published by Queen Games, is officially part of Queen Games’ Green Planet series, a line of games explicitly dedicated to themes of sustainability...
Canopy: Evergreen While its predecessor, Canopy, focused on the lush, dense tropical rainforest, Evergreen shifts the focus to a temperate forest ecosystem. In a functioning ecosystem, plants and animals rely on each...
Circular City – the board game Conceived and developed through a cross-border partnership between the municipality of Prato (Italy), the municipality of Taichung (Taiwan), and ARCO (Action Research for Co-Development) at the University of Florence, “Circular...
Darkwood Darkwood can be classified as an eco-horror game; while most survival games feed into an anthropocentric fantasy, dropping the player into the wilderness to chop down trees, exploit resources, and...
