Climate Station is a free PS5 game that presents a history of Earth’s climate in the form of a data visualisation and documentary tool. It also comes with PSVR2 support, which is a bonus. What I like most about Climate Station is that it pitches its data and insight in a way that doesn’t feel preachy or like it’s trying to convince you. Instead, it presents data in an interactive way to allow gamers to interegate it, personalise it, and draw their own conclusions.
Broadly speaking, there are three parts to Climate Station.
The first part is Weather Year, which presents all known weather data in a timelapse fashion. You can change the overlays, such as temperature change or carbon dioxide measurements and see the globe change over the years. It works like a movie editing timeline. By providing your age and place of residence, you can then see your personal weather charts, or perhaps your future holiday destinations might be worth pinning, too! This part of Climate Station focuses on the past, providing icon pins for you to click on for more information about big world events like floods, droughts, fires, and other key climate events.
The second area is Observations, which presents different types of charts that you can place side by side to see changes or relationships between things over time. This is more focused on the present day, helping explain why the weather feels so volatile, or why historical norms may not be the norm today. What I like specifically about this is that you can set up graphs and their parameters to then run like a data visualisation model. It feels like a great tool to get a new audience interacting with data in new and different ways. The user interface is minimal, so it doesn’t feel too overwhelming, and all the colours running in motion look interesting on a flat screen, but I’d imagine they’d stand out more in PSVR2 mode. Lastly, there is Projections. This follows the same approach but lets you plot out your choice of data for the next 75 years.
Alongside this, there’s about 90 minutes of documentary footage that reminds me of early 2000s National Geographic or BBC style of geography lessons. My only mild niggles come from a lack of labelling. Some 3D scenes that you can move around in are very limited in scope and have few labels to draw your attention to things. I’d have also liked some of the labels on the graphs where units and names get quite technical. Maybe some easy-to-access hint text would help. These are tiny niggles in what is otherwise a great delivery of edutainment.
Crucially, Climate Station is free. It offers education without laying on the moral of the story thickly, and combining that with some personalisation options, it makes playing with data a more enjoyable and compelling experience. I’d love to see some other topics, such as animal migration or natural disasters, laid out similarly. I think they could be tied back to the climate theme, but present it from a different perspective. Not just for kids, Climate Station is an approachable take on data visualisation that lets its users find their own answers. Good fun for the curious.
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