The roads have become so hot in the Pacific Northwest last summer that the sidewalk cracked and buckled. The hurricane season is getting longer every year. As the polar ice recedes and wildfires level suburban backyards, it’s not terribly hard to imagine life as it exists in the game. Re-wild– scorched, smoggy and devoid of life as we know it.
Re-wildunder development by an independent studio heavy meadow and the recent recipient of a grant from the NYU Game Center, begins in the 2200s, after we have shut down America’s ecosystems and retreated into resilient megacities.
The main character, Syd, has been tasked with restoring a small plot of land in upstate New York, turning a barren wasteland into a functioning ecosystem. They are employed by ReGen, a megacorporation that sees restoring the planet not as a moral imperative, but as a juicy opportunity for tax relief. If that wasn’t enough, the process of rewilding will take hundreds of years, so Syd manages their little patch of greenery between extremely long naps in a cryogenic pod.
Syd is understandably skeptical of ReGen’s intentions. Their questions about the value of the work are offset by bubbly statements from a fellow AI who has been programmed for blind optimism about the project. Together they monitor soil conditions and plant seedlings, then return over the years to see the results.
Re-wild, which focuses on the degradation of the natural world and the ability to restore it, is part of a long tradition of games that address environmental issues. 1997 Final Fantasy VII influenced a whole generation of young gamers by making big corporate polluter Shinra the bad guy and a bunch of scrappy eco-terrorists the heroes. Another PlayStation RPG, 1999 Chrono-Cross, explores humanity’s reckless extinction of other species and asks if we deserve to live. games like Okami and Flower let players bring vibrant ecosystems back to life.
It’s no surprise that as climate change moves from an ominous possibility to a lived experience, games that incorporate environmental collapse into their themes or mechanics are becoming more common. But many of them offer simple solutions to complex problems. The only critically acclaimed protagonist of 2016 Abzu can bring ocean ecosystems back into balance in a single afternoon. OkamiThe celestial brush restores nature with divine power.
Other recent games with environmental themes indulge in naïve fantasies about controlling nature, rewarding players for their mastery. nil earth, another game about rewilding billed as an “inverted city builder”, falls into familiar patterns, exploring nature as a resource to be managed. Its top-down perspective evokes divine dominion over the landscape, taking the crumbling earth as a blank canvas on which humanity can start afresh.
Re-wild offers a darker but more sophisticated portrayal of the end of the world. Its development team worked from the start to emphasize the lack of player control. In an extensive interview with WIRED, Re-wildThe creators of point out that they wanted to do something that challenged the extractive calculus of farming simulators and other resource management games.
