Chris InglisWorld Turtles is a wholesome colony builder developed by a solo developer from South Africa, Re: cOg Mission, and the game is looking to release in early access on Steam in September. World Turtles sees you running a colony of Meeps on top of a giant turtle that is swimming about the cosmos of space, as you work to save their colony as well as the giant world turtle itself. I love turtles and I do like a good colony simulation game so putting the two together seems like a great recipe.
Starting with the tutorial, World Turtles starts you off with a half-built colony and guides you well through learning what else is needed to get the Meeps colony running efficiently. We must help them with gathering wood and stone, building farms, improving their efficiency, and upgrading these buildings as we gain experience. The map is laid out in hex tiles, and your buildings all have a suggested building place, though you can move the template around to find the best climate stats for placement.
While we are floating in space on the back of a gigantic turtle, the rest of the game has a medieval flare, right down to some of the accents of the Meeps as they tell you what they are lacking or what they want you to work on next. I was thankful for these subtle yet important prompts as there’s a lot to think about in these games and it’s good to get a little jab in the ribs to get me back on track.
You can click one of the Meeps and a box appears in the top-left corner of the screen as the camera follows it’s activities. Also clicking each building will show you the two Meeps that have been assigned to it, though I couldn’t give them commands of what to do or where to go. At one point it looked like two Meeps had got stuck getting into a farm door, but a few seconds later they continued their work.
Every tile in World Turtles has climate stats of temperature, water and humidity, and as the world turtle moves through space, the atmosphere numbers change. As you start a fresh game, thinking about climate numbers is at the forefront. The free play maps lack the same narrated prompts from the tutorial but do have icons that you can hover over for help as you go along.
While these are extremely useful, if like me, you accidentally click on them first instead of just hovering, you’ll lose that helpful tip. It would be awesome if we could have a little mission log that stores all these tips so I could refer to them later. I did forget a heap of things as I progressed and was able to look back at my recorded videos, but a little mission log would be of great help.
Looking around the procedurally generated map on this turtle, you will see resources and animals such as melons, capsicums, sheep, and cattle. You need to build a wanderer’s hut who are your scouts basically. Once they have scouted enough to gain experience, you will unlock the ability to scavenge, and they can then scavenge those types of areas for greater resources.
As workers work and the building types gain experience, you will be able to select unique research technology streams for those buildings, such as building paths to the village centre from the stonemason or being more efficient at clearing stone or wood. Your Meeps will also evolve and have children, adding to your population so you need to make sure you are farming enough food.
Farming is the most technical of the resource gathering I found as the types of crops you can grow all have different climate requirements, so you need to pay attention to the stat options before planting them. If you plant a crop type that isn’t suitable to the current climate, your yield will suffer penalties.
While this is a colony simulation game and there are ‘unfriendly’ meep tribes, there didn’t appear to be any combat-related buildings or units in this early access version. Zooming the map out, I could see what looked like other village centres, so I imagine I can expand my colony out to meet them. Also, zooming the map out completely shows other turtles moving through space with me. I am unsure how they relate to the overarching story but are cool to see anyway.
So far, World Turtles has a lot of promise to be a super chill and relaxing colony simulation game and I loved the music tracks that played in the background. I liked that the track title and artist were shown briefly when the music changed to give a nod to those artists. I am looking forward to seeing how this game develops as it heads towards it’s early access release in September.
This preview utilised a key provided by Re: cOg Mission and World Turtles is coming to Steam early access in September 2022.
