Having been a huge fan of world-building sims along the lines of Civilization and some others (shout out to Master of Orion in particular) over the years, I’ll admit that more often than not they don’t tend to convert well to home consoles. That isn’t hard to understand, especially given that the deeper the strategic elements are, the more screens and menus you’ll typically need to navigate through. To date, while there have been some strategy titles that have fared reasonably well on the eShop, more often than not there have been struggles. At least to BioEden’s credit, given its focus more on rebuilding the environment instead of trying to conquer the world, it manages to carve itself out a smaller niche where it doesn’t have all that much competition.

The idea in the game is to oversee the rebuilding of habitats and the creatures that live in them, working step by step to attempt to revitalize planets whose environments have fallen into a toxic mess. First establishing a biodome that will serve as your primary focus, you’ll introduce new species and then work diligently to try to set them up with the elements they’ll need to thrive. Whether that’s in the form of vegetation, water, things to feed on, or tweaking the local temperature or humidity, there are quite a lot of concerns you’ll need to manage. As you continue to expand the demand for more materials will grow, requiring you to also essentially establish a network of resource gathering stations outside your dome, being sure to collect all of the vital elements you need to continue on.

Where it begins to get tricky, even in the pretty extensive demo, is that to do this correctly you’ll find there are no shortcuts or easier answers. It turns out that building things and collecting resources too quickly in a fragile environment has the potential to do greater damage, perhaps even triggering hazardous events that will put everything you’re working on in jeopardy. Thankfully an easy ability to recycle anything you’ve built ends up being your saving grace, allowing you to move things around as your needs change, or as your resource collectors simply tap out everything they can in a given zone, which actually ends up being a means of healing areas on the planet’s surface one at a time as well. 

There are barriers to enjoyment though, and depending on your patience they can be taxing. One issue is simply with gaps in what the game will provide to you as direction, and what you’ll actually need to do. Even in the tutorial you’ll need to take what you’ve learned and work out what you’ll need to do to complete your next objective. That probably wouldn’t be such an issue if it weren’t for the fact that the symbols the game chose to use for resources aren’t great, and some of them honestly are easy to mistake for one another, sometimes leading to confusion and frustration, especially since finding where some resources are on the surface can be tougher than it should be at times. Another obstacle is with the controls and the interface, with the pretty consistent need to alternatively work with both the joysticks and the D-Pad making for some cumbersome controls that are easy to forget, and some screens that are easy to get lost in. Putting it all together, the good news is that it feels like a pretty unique sim in the eShop that works reasonably well, just bear in mind that it also has rough edges and may be more frustrating than its worth for people with less overall patience than average.