Never before has poo been used in such a pivotal way outside of a comedy game in gaming, but this is the claim to fame that PolyPine makes. I must say, it totally delivers on the premise, too. PolyPine is an 2D ecosystem and nature simulator that kept me hooked from beginning to end with its varied scenarios and balanced systems. It might have poo in the design, but this is far from being a pooey game.
PolyPine starts off as a blank canvas with just you and the open terrain. You’ll have a currency called “bp”, which is your balance points for how well nature has taken hold in your forest. At first, you’ll want to plant a tree, some flowers, or some grass, as this provides the natural green plant habitat to allow animals to sustain themselves in your forest. These cost bp but will also generate it each in-game year as acorns drop from trees to sprout new trees, for example. To speed up gaing bp you’ll want to introduce some animals. Starting off with squirrels, butterflies, or maybe some ants – you’ll spend bp placing them in your forest and letting them do their thing. Each plant and animal has unique requirements that must be met for them to stay. If there aren’t enough flowers, butterflies will vanish. If there isn’t enough grass then hares might not stay. This introduces you softly to PolyPine’s basic concept of balance.
Balance is everything in PolyPine. As more animals join in, you’ll start to uncover hunters and prey on a food chain. A fox needs enough hare to kill to live, which means ensuring that hares are breeding enough to keep a steady number. That requires the right plant life to be plentiful to keep the food chain going. Whilst this has the potential to be finicky and pure busywork, PolyPine allows you to automate the hunting and breeding of animals and the reseeding of plant life. You just need to make sure the automation chain is balanced. This is excellently explained in the game’s campaign mode, which introduces new concepts and things to deal with in each scenario. Water has its own green and wildlife systems. Some plants need shade, and some need to be near water. Some trees and bushes need to be nearby to feed from each other. As a player, you must take into account the roots of the trees and bushes around you and you can see them spread out in the soil. If roots can’t grow, the tree may wither and die.
Death can be very useful in PolyPine, as some fungi and certain animals can only grow on fallen tree branches. This can be triggered by using bp to trigger an animal attack or by using bp to trigger a weather event. A storm may flood some areas of low land or pocketed dips. That water may kill off some fauna, whilst a wind storm or fire will ruin some of your forest at random. Reacting to broken ecosystems that were once balanced to restore them is key, but again, these fallen or ashen trees will create new opportunities, too. Nature is a cycle and PolyPine never shies away from that. It is a better game for it. Time marches on at pace, and trees will eventually die of old age too. Whilst this doesn’t lock you into a time limit to complete a level – you can go at your own pace – you just need to be mindful to repopulate things over long plays.
All of this happens in a bright colour palette with simple but stylish low-poly graphics. Colour is used to show how fertile the soil is and that’s where poo comes in. By clicking on deer or other large animals, they’ll poo and create new fertile soil in the ground. This gives it a lush green tone. Some fauna need poo from several animals to grow and so you’ll be clicking away like a clicker game to make sure everyone has plopped in the right places. Again, this can be automated with bp, and I recommend it so you can focus on other things.
The main campaign mode is expertly crafted to show all the different facets of PolyPine. Mountain areas have animals and plants that can or can’t be placed at certain altitudes. Smaller land animals crossing water might get chomped by the bigger fishes. Sometimes, a storm or a forest fire can repopulate an area. The campaign alone was a treat but you can also try out custom-seeded levels to create your own levels on the fly, or just enjoy a sandbox mode without the worries of balance. There are hours of fun to be had, and it’s incredibly engrossing. I kept popping back to tinker with designs and levels only to find myself playing beyond the win state for the level because I was enjoying myself. It is also worth noting the campaign mode features some handy upgrades to your arsenal which reduces down the need for clicking to poo all the time or by increasing your starting bp. All very handy as the games’ clicker elements are probably the weaker elements of the games’ design.
Whilst PolyPine might be unfairly marketted as a poop simulator, its anything but poo. This is a thoughtful, balanced, engrossing experience. Relaxed and cosy gamers will enjoy this (although you need to deal with death constantly), and fans of nature and city builder sims will find parallels in the game design. This was a complete surprise and a very pleasant one to play.
Review copy provided by the developer. PolyPine is out now.
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