New tile placement game Preserve has a cool theme: Build up flourishing ecosystems by dropping down water, plants, and animals to form environments within your larger biome to sustain ever-more-complex ecosystems. It's set up as a puzzle because everything you place has a symbiotic effect on everything else. Bees and flowers need each other, as a very simple example.
"Preserve is a relaxing puzzle nature-building game in which you flourish a vibrant ecosystem by cleverly placing plants and animals," says the developer.
A cool twist that Preserve has over other tile-placement games on PC is that its biomes can also expand vertically in addition to horizontally. Stacking biomes on top of each other can make new, higher-altitude regions with different plants and animals. You can also upcycle the cards that represent your tiles, eventually creating natural wonders to place—like the Alps or massive redwood forests.
The early access release has three separate biomes to build up and flourish inside. Future releases will add more puzzles, a compendium, achievements, and more biomes before the 1.0 launch. It did launch with a nice photo mode, so you can share your complete creations by adjusting the time of day and position of the sun.
Preserve will probably appeal to people who really liked Dorfromantik, though I think there's an element of what some players loved to do in Terra Nil here as well.
You can find Preserve on Steam for $12.50, though it's on sale at 20% off until August 22. It's developed by Slovakian studio Bitmap Galaxy and published by Grindstone.
