Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access. This week, he is pursued by the insidious spectre of climate change in sandbox survival game Eco.
Developer: Strange Loop Games
Publisher: Strange Loop Games
Release: Out now (early access)
On: Windows
From: Steam
For: 23.79/$31/ 28
Ask anyone what Minecraft is missing and they ll all tell you the same thing: an impending sense of climate doom, the pervasive fear of a warming globe that haunts the modern psyche like a crap ghost who keeps showing you scary looking graphs. Eco is an open world co-operative survival game that manages to do just that, incorporating that now-familiar sense of creeping dread which perches in our collective subconscious, and in our quietest moments reminds us that the planet is dying and that one day this hot, wet little space rock will boil over and turn back into mud, dissolving us all in the acidic stew that was once our oceans. So that s nice.