When I read the description for the Evolution Survival demo on Steam’s Next Fest page – “a survival game where the universe evolves around you” – I thought it might be a bit like Spore. It was not like Spore.
The game is scheduled for release this December, and it takes place on a solitary planet inhabited by bizarre creatures and surrounded by a stunning array of stars. You wake up on an island, unclothed, unhoused, and hungry. You start gathering wood and rocks to build campfires, tools, and a primitive shelter. Or, if you’re like me, you run into an overly aggressive animal and die immediately. No worries, there’s always the next generation, though without a shelter, it’s forced to spend the night wading through darkness.
Speeding through history
Life goes on until it doesn’t. Time is sped up in Evolution Survival, and it doesn’t take long for you to notice that the planet you’re trying to survive on isn’t all that stable. Sometimes,w a massive sun floats overhead, roasting you and all the other blocky little creatures alive. Occasionally, a gleaming white dwarf takes center stage in the sky, and even though it looks pretty nice, it’s not warm enough to keep the planet alive. The oceans freeze over, but wave sound effects still drift up from beneath their icy surface. Your character dies, respawns, and groans in pain as the environmental damage saps its life away over and over again until a more stable sun rises.
The game’s evolution system doesn’t just affect the stellar bodies above you and the weather around you. As each day progresses, the animals and even the landscape start to shift. Seeing each wave of creatures take on a new shape is exciting, but I’d also find myself chasing a rock for my latest tool, only to have it vanish with the sudden passage of time. Even when it frustrated me, there was something delightful about seeing the world slowly change to take on new forms.
No math necessary
Of course, as I played, I couldn’t help but think of 3 Body Problem, the book, the Netflix show, and the game depicted in each. In 3 Body Problem, the characters exist in an ever-changing world, and their only hope for building a sustainable civilization is to mathematically determine their planet’s orbit between its suns. Evolution Survival lets you host a server for your friends, so you are trying to gather resources to build sprawling structures and form a civilization together. Unlike 3 Body Problem, though, there’s no solution to be found and no promise of survival.
In stable periods, Evolution Survival plays like a pretty straightforward survival game. When everything falls apart, and the chaos stretches on for what feels like years, the game feels a bit like an exercise in existentialism. You might be able to build a fledgling society with a server full of friends, but eventually, a rogue star will wipe you all out of existence. Still, there’s something oddly satisfying about struggling against the inevitable. At least your ruins will remain for your future generations to discover. I’ll be excited to see what the game has in store when it releases sometime in December 2024.
