WorldBox

WorldBox (2021) is a sandbox world simulator where you make your own rules to create, nurture, and annihilate pixelated civilisations. Play involves using simple point-and-click tools to craft a world of your choosing, where terrain, creatures and people live out the fantasy lives you dictate (until you spawn-in tornadoes or meteor strikes). It's a game you steward rather than control, setting up systems and scenarios and then seeing whether the computer-controlled simulation results in peaceful kingdoms, wars, alliances or anarchic collapse.

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You play the role of a pixel-art deity. In this way, you work to sculpt terrain with land, water and different biomes. You can then populate it with flora and fauna: creatures ranging from sheep to mythical beings and even fantasy civilisations (humans, elves, dwarves, orcs). The twist is that you don't control these beings. They autonomously build, develop, trade, and wage wars. All you can do is intervene with powers like earthquakes, plague, or blessings.

As you progress, civilisations evolve from simple huts and campsites into sprawling towns, temples, and militarised empires. You can refine their traits, assign new races, influence diplomacy by fostering alliances or instigating rebellions, and enjoy sandbox experiments like nuclear annihilations or zombie outbreaks.

This results in a game that's always fun to play again, as each simulation works out differently. The developer has continued to update it with family systems, languages, religion, genetics, more biomes and even a layer of emergent narrative. It's less like a scripted game and more like playful experimentation with living systems, reflecting both creation and destruction in equal measure.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked WorldBox 4 months ago. It was re-examined by Ellen Robertson and updated 4 months ago.