Three games that want you to save the world for real

1.1.2024

By Francisco Dominguez, Contributor

So often in games, we’re charged with the noble task of saving the world—and that challenge has become increasingly literal. It’s easy to fall prey to climate anxiety after witnessing sluggish international negotiations, reports of record fossil fuel profits, and streets lined with gas-guzzling Range Rovers. It’s almost enough to make you give up on recycling your soft plastics or stop trying to grow your own tomatoes.

But despite the polluted clouds of gloom, these three games want to show you there’s still a path forwards—perhaps not one that’s easily achieved, but one that’s important to hold onto nevertheless.
 

Terra Nil

Historically, games often sided with humanity over the rest of nature. Since the ‘90s, strategy games like Age of Empires goaded players into felling forests and paving over grasslands to get settlements up and running, consequences be damned. (Biodiversity and carbon sequestration weren’t a concern in the Middle Ages, after all.)

Terra Nil, billed as a reverse city builder, asks players to quit chewing up the environment for resources to accelerate your budding metropolis. Unlike Cities: Skylines, you’re not cleaning up your own erratic urban planning. Instead, you’re engaged in making up for humanity’s sins, carefully cleaning up corporate messes and restoring ecosystems back to their former glory, then leaving without a trace.

It’s an idyllic, meditative experience, turning pools of toxic muck into rich river life. This isn’t a cash economy. Your currency is leaves, generated from placing Irrigators on parched soil. Once you’ve raked enough leaves, and installed a grid of wind turbines, you’ve paved the way for a lavish assortment of Toxin Scrubbers, Radiation Cleansers, and other technological breakthroughs, fixing various ecological hazards and bringing the procedurally generated habitat back to life.

There are no people here, no active settlements, no secretive trucks dumping plastic waste in the rivers when your back is turned—just the all-powerful cursor dropping buildings, uninterrupted. As you plot out an orderly path to a lush utopia that endangered bears and wolves can come to call home, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of regret at the way things could have been.

Once your task is achieved, your new goal is to remove all traces of your own involvement and leave a now self-sustaining ecosystem to its own devices, like a responsible construction crew. Just recycle your tools responsibly, of course, and leave the grasslands, riverbeds, whales and corals undisturbed.

Terra Nil is a beautiful, idealistic dream—and it knows it. On successfully completing a region, the “Appreciate” button lets you admire your freshly reinvigorated land with aerial shots reminiscent of a David Attenborough documentary (if he ever applied his skills to an Advance Wars map).

So many environmental regeneration efforts don’t get this level of technology to play with, achieving the same results via hardworking rangers, volunteers with shovels, and a trickle of donations and grants. Just imagine what they could do with Terra Nil’s stock of tools!

Civilization VI: Gathering Storm

In climate terms, the Civilization series is pretty much the story of how we got in this mess to begin with. Charting the path from prehistoric hunter gatherers through the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the present day, and beyond, the Firaxis series has always led players through every stage of humanity’s outsized impact on the planet.

Civilization VI: Gathering Storm added natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and droughts—but it also meaningfully addressed the causes, risks, and challenges of climate change. As much an existential threat as Gandhi’s impatient thumb hovering over the nuclear button, the addition of CO₂ levels and rising seas is a far-reaching change. While a simplistic model for climate impacts, Gathering Storm makes its point terrifyingly well when your coastal cities become a new Atlantis beneath the ever-rising waves.

You can’t talk about carbon emissions without talking about energy, which in reality accounts for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.The expansion introduces Power, a necessary resource from the Industrial Era onwards. You won’t find an alternate technological path that skips coal power plants and oil rigs in favor of fields of wind turbines and solar panels. Smokestacks and steam trains—and their resultant carbon emissions—are locked in.

And throughout Gathering Storm, you’re aware of the environmental cost of every piece of coal burned. You’re given a granular snapshot of global CO₂ levels, your own contribution, and forensic insights into the likelihood of its consequences: extreme weather, floods and droughts, the loss of polar ice sheets, and the associated sea level rises.

You’re not entirely defenseless against climate impacts, though. Once you reach the Future era, you can develop the Global Warming Mitigation Civic and engage in Carbon Recapture to scrub out emissions for diplomatic brownie points—which, it turns out, is slightly OP and can even take your Civ’s emissions into the negative. If only reality were so straightforward. Real-world technology is still some distance behind Firaxis’s easy fix.

Global problems need global solutions, and Gathering Storm’s World Congress takes a laudably active role in promoting widespread efforts to halt emissions. The way the Climate Accords turn the most powerful Civs into a race to cut the most carbon is an example that our own world leaders could learn from—as long as they don’t exploit building coal power plants just to decommission them for cheap Diplomacy points!
 

Under the Waves

In the year that Dave the Diver enticed so many players with the joys of aquatic life, it’s easy to forget just how fragile these coral ecosystems and marine life can be. Warmer waters and the rising acidity of CO₂-absorbing oceans risks the loss of entire habitats.

That beauty, majesty, and fragility found in the depths is the focus of Under the Waves, a narrative adventure from Parallel Studio. You play as Stan, an offshore drill operative in the North Sea in a retrofuturistic 1970s—meaning you’re part of the problem. You’re a UniTrench employee, alone except for your radio contact and the company of your corporate robot companion.

Under the Waves features a lavish depiction of the marvelous worlds to be found on the ocean floor. Schools of fish dart through sea grass and red algae before emerging into view, then swirling around to evade your path. An inquisitive seal (that Stan quickly names Jo) playfully peeks through your submarine porthole. Whale calls echo through the waters—and if you’re lucky, you might even catch sight of a humpback whale slowly passing by. It’s a magical world, and one that deserves to be left alone.

Your employer’s rusting equipment, satellite dishes, and looming oil rig are intrusions in this scenic realm. They fight a losing battle against water pressure and saltwater. The mollusc-encrusted oil pipes extracting thousands of gallons of crude oil demand Stan’s constant attention—though he always finds time to pick up plastic waste that was thoughtlessly discarded into the sea.

The oil rig itself is a sinister and treacherous steel construct, its industrial corridors partially illuminated in blinking red light, like an abandoned spaceship with horrors hidden in the shadows. When things go wrong—thanks to UniTrench’s cut corners and disregard for anything except profits—tendrils of black oil streak through the water like tentacles, escalating to huge plumes seeping and expanding like an imminent thunderstorm.

UniTrench’s corporate propaganda repeatedly promises “low impact” oil drilling activity. By the mid-game, Stan is fully disillusioned, saying “I have a monster to kill” as he races against the currents to shut off the main drilling units and limit a huge ecological disaster.

Playing a small figure in a morally compromised situation, Stan is perhaps the most relatable figure of all. He’s morally conflicted, searching for the path of least harm while doing the bidding of an oil company, an errand boy for their PR department. Even when it feels like an impossible situation and every choice available is a bad one, Under the Waves shows that every fraction of a degree matters.

It’s a lesson worth remembering—and don’t let your politicians forget it either!