I got the feeling that Darwinia was going to be something special when I heard that Gabe Newell from Valve had been raving about it. He points out that most games don’t capture his attention long, but he and several other people at Valve are hooked on this one. In another post, they even warned you not to make plans for the day after the game’s release, because you’ll be up all night playing.
I got even more excited when I found out that Darwinia was made by Introversion, the same company that produced Uplink a few years back. It was a computer hacking simulation that was pretty cool, if a bit limited. Honestly, the coolest thing about it was that it was actually made by a few guys who met in college and started producing games because they didn’t like the direction the games industry was heading. They bill themselves as “the last of the bedroom programmers,” though they’re obviously a bit larger nowadays.
It’s fun to read some of the background materials on their website showing the history of the game. They are not afraid to talk about mistakes and lack of direction during development, which is oddly endearing. The game’s roots come from the Indie Game Jam, which had developers experimenting with placing thousands of two-dimensional sprites in three-dimensional landscapes to simulate massive battles with a very low processor hit. The developers also freely admit that the game had little or no direction from an early date, and it was only later in the process that they were forced to admit that the game wasn’t any good, and revisit their initial assumptions, leading them to the game we have today.
Darwinia is their second game, and it is the sequel (at least in spirit) to Uplink. The basic premise (which is outlined briefly in the game manual, but barely touched upon in the game), is that “the world of Darwinia is a virtual themepark, running inside a computer network built by a computer genius named Dr Sepulveda.”
Sepulveda is presented as a sort of anti-Steve Jobs. He produced computers once upon a time, but a scandal that his computers were defective (apparently false) ruined him. He dropped out of the public eye, and only resurfaced recently with his “themepark,” which runs on a supercomputer composed of all his “defective” computers networked together. His virtual world is populated by little A.I.s called Darwinians. The world The Darwinians have an entire world, complete with mining, manufacturing and power generation facilities, as well as a unique life cycle and apparently a religion of sorts (I’m unclear on this because I haven’t hit the higher levels such as the Temple yet).
You arrive at the themepark and are verbally assaulted by Sepulveda, who is frantically trying to clear a virus that is killing the Darwinians and taking over the virtual world, and is irritated with your intrusion. He quickly relents, and asks you to help him clear the level. This “tutorial” level consists of Sepulveda walking you through the basics of running programs and killing viruses. From there, you proceed through more heavily infected levels, gradually cleaning and restoring the Darwinians’ world.
The gameplay is a neat twist on the usual RTS games, in that it doesn’t allow you to control the Darwinians at all. You can influence them by promoting individual Darwinians to Captains, who can issue movement orders to the masses. You can also create Squads, which are simple soldier programs that do very little on their own, and Engineers, who can be used to capture buildings and harvest resources. The “resources” are the souls of dead Darwinians and Virii, which are put into an incubator, and eventually released as new Darwinians, who you then direct to man various bits of equipment to bring their world back to life.
The interface is very simple, and is clearly meant to remind the player of a Unix environment (albeit a highly stylized one). Squads and Engineers are utterly disposable programs with no souls, and so you feel no hesitation to send them to their deaths, because you can instantly create new ones by running the program again. You are only limited in the total number of programs you can at once, and where those programs will “spawn” on the landscape. The only time you try to conserve your programs is when you have a lengthy march from the spawn point. You feel a bit more sympathy for the Darwinians, since after a slaughter, the battlefield is littered with little green souls. Even if you can gather them all up and bring them back with the Incubator, you feel guilty about killing them, or failing to defend them properly.
One of the most trumpeted features on the website is the lack of icons on screen and the gesture-driven interface. These are clear headnods to Black & White, which did the same thing. In fact, it may have been too clear, since with the default configuration, the game shows some icons on screen (program selection) and mouse gestures are disabled by default. Still, it is quite nice that the bulk of the game interface is hidden, and is revealed by holding down Tab and mousing to the top or bottom of the screen, which reveals the game objectives, or the program selection screen. On the whole, the interface is very nice, but I was frustrated by the inability to invert my mouse. I’m constantly zooming up when I mean to zoom down. This is such a standard feature on other mouse-driven games that it’s hard to understand its absence here.
Darwinia is the first real advancement in RTS games I’ve seen in quite awhile. The changes they make to the standard gameplay elements are fascinating and addictive, though I doubt many of them will catch on in more mainstream games. Still, it’s good to see there are still developers out there trying to focus on doing more with less, rather than just adding polygons. You could do a lot worse than drop $20 on this genius little game.




