Instead, it is the server-wide actions of every player in aggregate that brings about change on the tiny, spherical world you occupy. Taken in isolation, your actions amount to a grain of sand tumbling through the doomsday hourglass. In practice, and much like in the real world, it’s hard to see the direct environmental impact of chopping down a single tree to make a cool chair. Eco takes something fundamental to the genre – the idea that these kinds of open worlds exist to be thoughtlessly plundered – and flip-turns it upside-down, asking players to consider the impact of our unfettered consumption on the world around us.
Build too many machines and they’ll belch out industrial waste, polluting the ground or pumping noxious gases into the atmosphere. Cut down too many trees to build your house and you’ll destroy the habitat of the local rabbit population, forever depleting a source of food and cute ears from the server. So that’s nice.Īpproaching the end of its first year in early access, this is a crafting and survival game in which the fragility of the environment is meticulously simulated. Eco is an open world co-operative survival game that manages to do just that, incorporating that now-familiar sense of creeping dread which perches in our collective subconscious, and in our quietest moments reminds us that the planet is dying and that one day this hot, wet little space rock will boil over and turn back into mud, dissolving us all in the acidic stew that was once our oceans.
This week, he is pursued by the insidious spectre of climate change in sandbox survival game Eco.Īsk anyone what Minecraft is missing and they’ll all tell you the same thing: an impending sense of climate doom, the pervasive fear of a warming globe that haunts the modern psyche like a crap ghost who keeps showing you scary looking graphs. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.
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