The road is like that hot in the Pacific Northwest this past summer cracked and warped sidewalks. storm season grow every year. As ice at the pole descending and Suburban backyard forest fireit’s not too hard to imagine life as it exists in the game Rewrite—There is fog, fog, and no life as we know it.
Rewriteis being developed by indie studio Heavy grasslands and recent recipients of grants from NYU Game Centerwhich began in the 2200s, after we eliminated America’s ecosystems and retreated to resilient megacities.
The main character, Syd, has been tasked with restoring a small parcel of land in Upstate New York, transforming a barren waste into a functional ecosystem. They were hired by ReGen, a large company that sees restoring the planet not as a moral imperative, but as a great opportunity for tax breaks. If that weren’t enough, the rework would take hundreds of years, so Syd curated their little patch of greenery between extremely long naps in a frozen shell.
Syd really doubts ReGen’s intentions. Their questions about the value of the work are offset by the fiery statements of an AI companion who is programmed for blind optimism about the project. Together they monitor soil conditions and plant seedlings, then check back over time over the years to see the results.
Rewrite, with a focus on the degradation of the natural world and its restoration, belongs to a long tradition of games grappling with environmental issues. 1997 Final Fantasy VII influenced a whole generation of young gamers by casting the big polluter of the company Shinra as the villain and a group of shabby eco-terrorists as the hero. Another PlayStation RPG, 1999 Chrono Cross, explores humanity’s careless extinction of other species and asks whether we deserve to live. Games like Okami and flower allowing players to revive the vibrant ecosystem.
Unsurprisingly, as climate change shifts from terrifying possibilities to live experiences, games incorporate environmental collapse into their themes or mechanics. increasingly popular. But many of them offer easy solutions to complex problems. The only protagonist of the year 2016 is critically acclaimed Abzû could bring balance to the ocean’s ecosystems overnight. Okamicelestial paintbrush restores nature with divine power.
Other recent environmental-themed games create naive fantasies of nature’s control, rewarding players for mastering it. Terra Nil, another rewrite game promoted as “reverse city builder”, falls into familiar patterns, exploring nature as a resource to be managed. Its top-down perspective evokes divine domination over the landscape, taking the ruined earth as the blank canvas on which humanity can begin fresh.
Rewrite offers a faded but more sophisticated portrait of the apocalypse. Its development team set out from the beginning to emphasize the lack of player control. In a wide-ranging interview with WIRED, RewriteThe creators emphasized that they wanted to create something that questioned the mining calculus of farming simulators and other resource management games.
