There is a growing strain of game imagery. Not a genre, but a play style or an aesthetic. Soothing ambient music, minimalist design, simple play schemes with unintimidating adversaries, clear goals and pleasant locales. I put Flower, Flow, and Dyson in this category. Dyson is a new indie game, made in under a month for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition.
I'll let the developers explain it:
Dyson is an ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals. Remotely command semi-autonomous self-replicating mining machines to take over an entire asteroid belt.
You start off with a planet. The planet grows trees. The trees grow seeds, which are used to colonize other planets, grow more trees, and expand across the game's universe. It's a bit more complicated than that, but this is one of those zen-like games that's perfect for unwinding after work. It's minimialism is what makes it so enjoyable. Call it an apertif between Supreme Commander sessions
Download Dyson for free.
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