Environmental conservation is a topic that I feel is on many minds these days. With the temperature getting hotter, rainforests getting smaller, and an overall feeling that things are quickly changing and not for the better, it can be easy to feel a desire to do more than any person is reasonably capable of to restore our beloved Mother Earth before it gets to a point where it’s unrestorable. While you may not be able to restore entire habitats on your own, much less in the blink of an eye, the idea is certainly cathartic.
Enter Preserve, a game that takes that fantasy and turns it into a relaxing puzzle game. More specifically, it takes the ideas of reforestation, restoring the coral reefs, and seeding the Sahara and turns them into an easily digestible game of building tiles.
Preserve is a game of connecting and restoring styles, earning points for the amount of restored and matching tiles you can place on the limited map space available to you. By restoring biodiversity in a once barren wasteland, you collect points and finally win a level by meeting the point goal.
A game of Preserve begins with a limited hex grip of tiles, all of which are uninhabited wastelands. You’re presented with a handful of cards to restore the terrain, beginning with rain (on most maps), which restores fertility to the ground. This then allows you to place trees, grass, flowers, etc, to create habits for animals to live in. These terrain types have to be placed in tiles of the correct type and elevation, with mountains requiring high elevation and grasslands requiring lower elevated tiles.
A habitat is created when three tiles of the same kind (forests, grass, etc.) are placed next to each other, and they can then grow larger to unlock spaces for animals to live in. Like terrain, animal cards can only be placed in areas that match their specified terrain requirements; Bees go in grasslands or flower fields, boars in forests, etc. Animals are worth the most points of any cards, being that they require the most set up to be placed and cash out the greatest amount of points when placed in a series of three. Three animals of one type in a single habitat give you a lot of points, but managing to place three distinct species of animals in a single habitat awards the most.
Once you’ve completed a level, you can move on to the next, with an ever-increasing score value across three different map sizes to continuously challenge yourself. A puzzle mode also exists, which ditches the game’s freeform format with a more calculated approach, demanding you place tiles in a specific order to complete the level, making them more like pieces to a puzzle. If you don’t feel like being challenged, there’s also a free build mode that just lets you decorate with tiles and cards to your heart’s content.
It wouldn’t be unfounded to say that Preserve is very similar to the 4X strategy game genre. While Preserve leans more on the puzzle side of things, it has a lot of the feeling games like Civilization have in its map-sprawling tile building and strategic planning ahead. However, while these types of games usually focus on industry and societal growth, Preserve is almost the opposite, growing nothing more than fields of grass for antelope to graze on.
Once you’ve gotten used to the standard Preserve rules, the game mixes things up by introducing you to new biomes with their own twists on the formula. The Savannah, for example, introduces rivers and dry grass, challenging how you place your tiles with even more restrictions. The Ocean biome replaces rain with elevation and introduces oxidization for an even more complicated set of rules.
Several biomes are currently available in the game’s Early Access state, and more are promised on the roadmap, promising even more strategic diversity and beautiful scenery down the line.
Graphically, the game is simple and yet stunning. While your plateau of tiles will begin unimpressive, adding habitats will quickly bring the world to life, filling the map with beautiful terrain and animated animals. It easily fills you with a sense of pride, seeing what was once a lifeless, barren hexagonal grid start to resemble something out of a nature documentary, genuinely giving a sense that nature is healing.
Preserve is not a big game. Once you get the hang of the game, which you should pretty quickly, there isn’t much to do besides continuously challenge yourself to earn more and more points, and that’s fine. Really, Preserve doesn’t need to be, and doesn’t try to be, anything more than a nice way to kill some time when you’re bored, gravitating away from the artificially time-consuming nature that is very many games that enter the market these days.
That being said, there really isn’t a whole lot to say about the game, either. The formula is solid and straightforward enough that something would have to be very wrong for me to find something to criticize. Though still in early access, I struggle to imagine just how far Preserve can really go from here. The game is simple yet solid, and I think that’s just fine for its $12 price point.
Preserve is a sweet and simple little game that celebrates nature and the natural world. It provides engaging yet mechanically uncomplicated puzzles that reward the player with beautiful nature scenes, challenging you to heal a barren world and return nature to its former glory. With great graphics and engaging gameplay, there’s not a whole lot more you can ask for, especially at the game’s modest price point.
Pros:
- Beautiful graphics depicting great nature scenes
- Fun, intellectually stimulating puzzle gameplay
- A great message about conservation and protecting the environment
Cons:
- Some may argue that the game is a bit small, but I think it’s perfect for its price point.
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