“Step into a cozy management journey as a Keeper and bring life back to a world quietly waiting to be healed. Craft the perfect biome for dozens of wonderful animal species and use your ingenuity to restore your planet, one ecosystem at a time.” – Steam Description

BioEden is a management sim that feels like a fun mishmash of RimWorld and Planet Zoo, shining the focus on the restoration of a polluted planet’s flora and fauna in a way that manages to balance its cozy vibes and engaging challenges. You’ll have to carefully manage resources while you build special biomes for cute animals to flourish in, all while navigating cataclysms and balancing your progress with the impact you have on an already struggling planet.

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Play Your Way

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When you start your adventure, you will choose a guild that matches the way you want to play! In addition to a tutorial leader that will teach you everything you need to know to make your planet and its inhabitants thrive, you have five guild leaders to choose from: the Makers, the Growers, the Mappers, the Menders, and the Seekers. Each choice comes with its own perks that change the focus of your gameplay. The Makers, for example, give you bonus starting Orbs that help balance things and keep things feeling more laid back.

The designs for the leaders are gorgeous and really capture the differences between the different guilds. (Note: I highly recommend starting your first game with Charles, who will make sure you have all the tools you’ll need to complete your mission. Besides, who doesn’t love a cute little tutorial robot?)

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Dome’s Away!

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You’re thrown pretty immediately into things, starting out in your own specialized dome where you’ll begin your mission: unlock a creature using their DNA fragments, place them in the dome, and meet whatever habitat requirements they need. I found this part of the game the least interesting, though it’s what I was most excited about. It’s fairly rinse and repeat, but there are some biome variations that keep you on your toes and make you put a little extra thought into where you’re placing each incubator so you can maximize your resource usage and space. All your cute little creatures wander freely around the dome, and are self-sustaining so long as you meet and maintain their needs.

As you discover more creatures, their needs start to evolve. Early on, this looks like the addition of humidity and heat requirements for certain biomes. As you gather research and technology points, you unlock new biomes and the things you’ll need for the creatures that live there.

I really wanted to enjoy this part of the game but it fell flat for me; the dens, the plants, and the other various needs for each biome quickly become cluttered and fairly difficult to look at. There’s no bonus to efficiency, other than less clutter for you to sort through.

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The Real Fun

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Outside the safety of your dome and out in the harsh, polluted environment you’ll build structures that harvest debris for the resources you need to save the planet. Your main progression here is lowering the pollution of the planet by harvesting debris and leaving fresh growth behind. This part of the game play is this games bread and butter; while you’re progressing inside the dome you’ll need to manage energy, resource harvesting, research, and exploration.

The twist is that the more structures you build to help the planet thrive, the higher the chances that your impact on the planet causes terrible events called cataclysms. You have a short amount of time to mitigate the damage they will cause, and once they’ve arrived, your only option is to ride them out and suffer the consequences they leave in their wake. They’re a great break in the monotony of grinding research and resources, but they can be really intimidating if you’re unprepared. Thankfully the sandstorm that I experienced was relatively mild and only slowed down my progression for a short while.

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• Graphics– Overall the graphics are nice, but become messy when you’re inside the dome and have progressed.
• Gameplay– The game has two gameplay loops between the inner and outer dome, and while the management outside the dome is challenging and fun, the inner dome gameplay falls flat and becomes fairly boring pretty quickly.
• Sound– The music is fine; it isn’t annoying or grating, but it definitely blends into the background. I found myself playing my own music just to keep things interesting.
• Controls– The controls were straightforward and easy to learn, but become frustrating as you switch between inner and outer dome tasks. Inside the dome, you’re able to move things freely, but outside you are forced to recycle, making planning difficult.
• Story– As with most games of this genre, you get half the story when you start, and the rest when you win. It’s a cute story, but typical.