Thrive the game taking the ideas from the ashes of spore and turning them into an far more intricate game, a game of balancing, surviving and as the title suggests thriving!

Thrive is still currently in development, with many ambitious goals still exactly that, ambitious goals. Development is slow, as in really slow, and that’s okay – given that the whole project is being freely developed. Development ‘started’ in 2009, with programming properly beginning in 2012. Thrive seems to be a bit like vaporware in this regard with a lot of ideas but not a huge drive to implement them. Which is again perfectly fine. But as we will go on to see this mishmash of ideas and random bits of development work being undertaken by individuals who are willingly disposing of their time to help move the project forward has created quite the output, even if that output is a mere pebble in comparison to what it wants to be.

So I played the game. The introduction animation is incredible, it’s hard not to raise your expectations too much when watching it. The game natively supports Linux which is a huge plus. The menus are readable and overall the user experience before the game has begun is well thought out, although I did have to search what LAWK meant, (Life as we know it). Starting a game of thrive, you begin as a single piece of cytoplasm floating through a volcanic vent – unless you chose to start somewhere else. You can see lots of other copies of your simple cell running around you, you will have to compete for resources not just with other species but also your own species. A nice nod toward intra-species competition. The aims of thrive are simplified from the typical aims of life, not to the extent of other evolution games, with glucose needing to be collected to break down into ATP, as well as nitrogen and phosphorus needing to be collected to help reproduce each cell organelle, at the beginning only your singular mitochondria needs to be replicated, but this rapidly spirals as your cell becomes more complicated. Once you replicate every organelle. You can navigate into the cellular editor.

Thrive does this thing where instead of replicating many times and occasionally mutating, you gather enough resources to replicate once, and then it pretends that 100 million years have past, and you can then pick a few mutations. The game has an algorithm to take into account your skill and the shape and structure of your cell to determine how much your cell population grows or shrinks. As a design choice I like it, and with how the mechanics for nitrogen and phosphorus are built, you will never be too long await away from being able to play in the editor. This balance that has been stricken between gameplay and evolution decisions is almost perfect, it can feel just sometimes like a little bit too long between each step. When it comes to allocating mutations you get 100 mutation points at the end of game play stage to spend on new parts for your cell, with each new part costing a set number of mutation points.

There is a great variety in the number of options for cell parts and upgrades, proteins that help break down iron and sulfur, flagellum and obviously the all important nucleus part, which unlocks all the eukaryotic cell parts such as mitochondria. Importantly you aren’t drowning in choice initially with most upgrades requiring you to jump a certain hurdle. Thyroids (the things enabling photosynthesis), require you to first be in a biome with a light level greater than 40%. Prokaryotic parts aren’t particularly difficult to unlock once you figure out how to move between biomes and patches. If you decide to take up a nucleus, you can unlock larger more powerful parts like the mitochondria, these are more difficult to get, either requiring you to engulf (eat) another species that the game has deemed suitable for you to turn into an organelle in a process called endosymbiosis. Or the game requires you to evolve a given number of proteins and then keep them for a set amount of time. This latter route takes a lot longer to achieve but is also much less effort.

At each evolution section of the game you can opt to move to different patch/biome, slowly exploring a map, starting in a thermal vent and moving upwards towards the sea surface and up river mouths, each environment brings different challenges and benefits. Sea caves bring with them massive sulfur supplies, whilst having no light to enable photosynthesis. Whilst Rivers have masses of light but a limited supply other usable compounds, such as iron. Importantly glucose supply rapidly drops off after the first few generations, this means that not finding a niche is a way to end up fighting over increasing limited and rare resources, as the game goes on.

The game does an amazing job of producing diagrams for the evolutionary history of your specific game, and an alright job of creating food chain diagrams at the end of each generation. The game also tries to give you an estimate of what your population will be based on what evolutionary upgrades you picked. For example, if you double in size then your population growth will probably half because the same amount of energy needs to go into producing more biomass. This is a nice touch although it can be demoralizing to see a single cytoplasm with a population 10x bigger than your own.

Finally the multicellular stage is clearly still in development, but its definitely playable. I felt that being the only multicellular organism got quite boring after a hot minute but planning out my designs was fun. The multicellular stage unlocks a second editor – one for the arrangement of your cells, as well as the ability to evolve different specializations of cells – enabling greater strategy. This editor pools from the same 100 evolution points as earlier – so like real life, evolution becomes very slow.

I liked the game, it was great fun for a few days until the waiting for evolutionary upgrades got to me and I decided to put it down. It’s got massive potential and a game to keep an eye on. I would 100% recommend to everyone despite the fact its in development.

Do tell me if this was a bit long winded just so I can get my reviews to a manageable Lemmy length