The Planet Crafter drops you on a dead planet. No oxygen, no water, no food. Just rocks, sand, and a blinking oxygen meter. You are not fighting enemies here. The enemy is the environment.
What makes it stand out is how much of the game is about building a livable world from scratch. You start with wind turbines and drills. Then slowly, step by step, you increase pressure, add heat, release oxygen, grow biomass. It is not instant, you do not get a green planet just because you built a few machines. First the sky turns blue. Then clouds. Rain. Lakes. Grass. It takes hours before anything even resembles life.
That is where the eco design really shines. You feel the effort. Every system depends on the others. Mo trees without oxygen, no oxygen without heat and pressure. It is layered, and it teaches you that ecosystems are slow and interconnected. Nothing grows unless you make space for it to grow.
Resources do not respawn, which I loved. It made me think ahead, how much iron do I have left? When do I leave the starting zone? Building a better backpack and planning out remote outposts is not just gameplay, it is logistics, sustainability in motion.
It does not hammer you with climate messages, but it does not need to. Just surviving long enough to turn a dead planet into a living one feels meaningful. You understand the scale of what is needed to make a place truly habitable. And that makes it special.