Preserve is a cozy, gorgeous world builder about celebrating nature | Early access impression
Preserve is almost the epitome of a calming game, even if it’s not the easiest title to describe fully. As it enters early access, Bitmap Galaxy’s game has three biomes and three modes, which is more than enough to get your head around it.
Which is not to say Preserve is complex. Rather it’s unique, and it tutorialises its systems sparsely. You begin by selecting campaign or creative mode, and from then choosing either classic or puzzle. The three biomes are Grassland, Savannah, and Underwater, and each prevents a small hex-based grid with a number of cards.
Usually, you’ll begin with a handful of rain cards and perhaps one deluge card. Clicking on the rain card and then on a barren hex will make that hex fertile. Now click on a forest card to plant a tree on it. Drop three trees in a row and they’ll turn into a forest habitat, which you can now drop an animal card into, such as a wolf or boar.
In puzzle mode, you’ll need to use all your available cards to earn the required tranquillity points. There’s no violence nor conflict, no visible synergy between habitats or animals. You have mountains, meadows, rivers, ponds, and in classic mode, all you’re required to do is hit milestones until you’ve earned enough points to move on. There are very few failstates outside puzzle mode, besides simply running out of cards.
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The underwater biome requires you to adjust sea level and raise the bed to take different forms of flora and fauna, but the systems remain largely the same. In the savannah biome, you’ll have three different types of terrain to build on, and certain cards can be played on either, while you can thread rivers between habitats to further fertilise the arid soil.
Puzzle mode can be genuinely taxing, working out how best to cluster the habitats to make full use of a set number of hexes, whereas in classic and creative the biomes expand as you cross milestones. By the time you’ve finished, there’s something beautiful about watching your little world move, animals patrolling, wind stirring tiny blades of wheat, eagles soaring above thumb-sized mountains. It looks lovely, and the music is pitch-perfect for each biome.
As a puzzle game, Preserve presents challenge enough, but as a creative builder, you may find it a little lacking at this point in its early access journey. The use of limited cards for an expanding space is clever, as more and newer cards are rewarded for hitting those milestones, but outside of the puzzle mode, it’s very simple and offers little besides relaxation – though that may be exactly what you come here for anyway.
