Bioneers and Primordialis are two in-development games with premises that sound similar on the surface: pick and choose the smallest of building blocks to create larger creatures from hundreds of cells, and then find out how they function... but the executions and the focus of each game look to be quite different. Let's take a look at each of them and what kinds of thinking they might have to offer.
First up is Bioneers, which bills itself as a strategy, simulation and automation game set in a microscopic world. It's got an emphasis on recreating bodily systems using factory-style gameplay: create networks of cells that carry materials around the organism's body, fend off virus attacks using immune cells, and adapt and grow your network into whatever type of creature best suits the environment. They even advertise building networks of neural cells and being "the architect of your organism’s instincts and intelligence." It's plain to see that this one is aiming to recreate the minute, interconnected details of biology on an impressive scale.
Bioneers is still a work in progress and doesn't yet have a release date or public demo, but the Steam page does have a button to request access to join the current public playtest. You can think of it as one step back from Early Access: the game is still in a beta testing form, but if you get access, you'll be able to get a taste of what's in store and potentially provide some useful feedback to help shape the game's development.
Primordialis is next, a game that is definitely stretching the boundary of what we typically categorize as "thinky." (But keep in mind that barrier is very fuzzy and subjective.) Combined and compared with Bioneers I thought it was very much worth highlighting, but I'm not sure I'd be covering it otherwise. This one has much more of an emphasis on combat and real-time happenings after you've designed your creature: it's a "physics-based roguelike fish builder" (lol) where you take your creations into a primordial soup filled with other strange little organisms and do some classic survival of the fittest.
So there's a lot of roguelite-combat stuff going on, but at the same time, the game is described as having a very deep and customizable creature creation system as well as a sandbox mode where you can make all sorts of different organisms and watch how they interact. The end of the trailer even shows what looks to me like their equivalent of a redstone computer... before some kind of bacteria beast smashes it to pieces. Even if you don't love fast-paced action, there could be some interesting stuff here.
Primordialis is currently available in Early Access on Steam. So the full game launch is yet to come, but you can technically play now if you don't mind some incomplete features or the occasional bug.
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