Have you ever looked around and wondered, if God is all-powerful, why is there so much pain and tragedy in the world? Why do natural disasters occur? Why do wars break out💖? Why are we slowly slipping into fascistic capitalism? Have you ever considered the answer is simply: we’re just not God’s favourites?
This week's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:indie spotlight is all about , an early-access game which places you in the role of the Galactic Gardener - a god-like being that can dictate the fate of the galaxy through a series of choices. Rather than directly controlling evolution as you would in Spore, you instead nudge budding species and emergent civilisations towards the stars and each other by making big picture dec🃏isions.
The goal of the game is simple: overcome the Fermi paradox - there are a near-infinite number of stars and habitable worlds out there, so why haven’t we heard from anyone else yet? You have to evolve and direct speci🎐es as they progress from the Stone Age all the way through their first contact with an alien planet, and into the singularity age, where ๊all will become one.
There are several planets in the galaxy that can sustain life. On Earth, the first decision is if you want to evolve dolphins - very Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Humans - boring - or dinosaurs - objectively cool. Each decision comes with a price measured in synthesis, the resource you’ll use to grow your galactic garden. The ‘bad’ decisions will reward you with synthesis, while the ‘good’ ones cost a lot. The game adapts to your play style and will adjust prices accordingly, so if you revel in the misery of a species you’ll start getting less, and if you try to create a utopia you’ll see prices soar.
Although the choices can seem simplistic at first - the top one is ‘good’, the middle is ‘neutral’, the bottom is ‘bad’ - they have far-reaching consequences. Because of my desire to create a sex-positive society, when it came time for them to blast off into space they were known as the dinosaur sex nations - incredible. One of the coolest names I ever got was the Prun nightmare children because I'd decided to allow kids to be traumatised for spiritual enlightenment.
If that sounds a bit on the nose, that’s because it is. The Fermi Paradox proudly wears its politics on its sleeve. The demo started with a dystopian human civilisation on the brink of war and climate catastrophe, so it’s clear what creator Jörg R𒉰eisig thinks of the current state of the world. The challenge lies in trying to build a better future for all.
The only way you win the game is🧸 by getting four civilisations to the final technological stage, the singularity age, at the same time. The easiest way to advance one species is to punish another. Like Cain and Abel, you can give one everything and the other nothing, but if you push one species too far, it’ll eventually go extinct and you’ll have less chance of winnin🎀g.
Initially, it’s easy to slip into this binary mode of decision-making. One planet gets a good choice, the other a bad one. You have to make one suffer so that another can prospe🏅r. But then your species start dropping like flies and one is left alone, the Fermi paradox remains unsolved. This is a very intentional mechanic designed to make you consider the galaxy as a whol✤e, rather than just focusing on an individual group.
The Fermi Paradox is the best kind of sci-fi - one that uses its fantastical setting to pose questions and provide answers we can use here on Earth. It lets you dabble in dystopia so that you 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:learn how to work towards utopia. I’ve long believed we won’t be the kind of space-faring species as seen in Star Trek or Mass Effect unless we can band together and form one unified planet. How could we ever hope to represent ourselves among the citizens of the stars if we can🐎’t even put on a unꦛited front? The Fermi Paradox shows us that it is possible for everyone to thrive and reach the singularity, joined together in Eden. We just can’t take the easy route there.