With the ascension of cosy ecosystem games like Terra Nil and Dorfromantik, Preserve enters the puzzle genre with a unique spin to its hex tile based gameplay. This game is all about building biomes that meet the needs of certain types of animals. It has more in common with a jigsaw strategy game than perhaps the aforementioned duo does but Preserve brings plenty of fun to the table.
Each natural habitat (level) has its own unique rules but largely the principles and goals remain the same. You’ll start off with a plot of land carved into hexagonal pieces and they need to be watered to allow vegetation to grow. You do this by placing down lakes, streams or simply raining on it using the cards you have in your deck. Its then up to you what types of ecosystems you’d like to lay down. In the first area, we’re dealing with forests and mountains so you can place down hexes of trees side by side, or mountains, flowers or crops. Placing three next to each other opens up an animal slot and hopefully the cards in your deck that are available will match that habitat. Bees belong to flowers, wolves to the mountains and so on. Placing all these tiles and animals earns you points and new cards and areas of the map are unlocked as you cross point thresholds. You need to slot everything together in the way that brings you the most points with whatever the RNG gods have given you and that’s the goal of Preserve. Score big with what you’ve got.
Grouping environments is critical as animal slots open up when you have 3, 6 or 12 of the same thing joined together. If you place three of the same animal in the same environment (3 bees in flowers) you’ll score big points. You score bigger if you manage to find three different animals that can all fit in the same environment though and that takes planning, skill and a bit of luck to achieve. Sometimes you can ret-con a previous move to make this happen with removal cards and that ensures Preserve feels and plays more skill driven than luck driven. Other things to think about are multipliers such as lakes that need to always run downhill but doubles the points of things around it, or deciding where to slot in the various terrains you unlock through progression. Preserve is a game that gets more complex and thoughtful the longer you play and that’s fine by me.
There are three biomes or level types in Early Access. Forest plays with terrain. The desert brings in a new mechanic where rain only lightly coats some grass, making the truly bountiful lush grass only available through ponds and streams. The underwater coral biome has the ability to raise and lower land as some animals and environments must be in trenches or on beach surfaces and requiring oxygenation. All three play differently and come with small, medium and large maps for you to test your brain for a high score challenge. If you don’t like that, there is a designer photo mode where you can mix and match elements from biomes and take cute photos. The other big mode in Preserve is puzzle mode. Here, instead of RNG playing a factor, you are given dev made levels and limited moves to make the perfect score. These are tough and get tough quickly due to the amount of choice you have available to make a wrong move. I enjoyed having structured levels and I’ll be slowly working my way through them over time as I get better at the game.
With more biomes promised across early access, I can’t find much if anything to fault the game on from a technical or rules perspective. Occasionally I felt like I was dealt a particularly annoying hand of cards early on in a game that would see me run aground early but that was few and far between. I found Preserve engrossing, uplifting, cosy and satisfying to play. As long as the upcoming biomes continue to add a new mechanic each time, this should sail through early access and become a shining example of taking a new trend and working on a unique variation on the theme. Enjoyable.
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