Preserve is a wonderfully chilled and beautiful relaxing nature-building game

If you love tile-based chilled puzzle games like Dorfromantik, you'll probably really love Preserve. This one is all about repopulating a wasteland to create a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem. Note: key via the developer.

Just released into Early Access, it's available now with Native Linux support and from my testing it really does work great. One of the most chilled and relaxing games I've played recently, with a peaceful atmosphere that allows you to almost zone-out with it and as you're placing down all types of tiles to bring the world to life. It doesn't get much calmer than this while playing games.

Very similar in style to the likes of Dorfromantik, Tiny Atolls and ISLANDERS where you start with nothing and gradually build up a score of points based on what tiles you put down, and building up a combination score from having multiple of the same together.

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I especially love the way you expand the world. Instead of you revealing more as you go, you build up points to purchase a new land expansion, which you place around the existing land in a place and position of your choosing, allowing you to really get it how you want it.

That, and the vertical system. Here it's not just placing down tiles, you're gradually building upwards as well with tiles on top of tiles. Eventually, you end up with a ridiculously vibrant world full of different colours and habitats for flora and fauna.

While it is a puzzle game, it's much more on the chilled side, the points system is reasonably easy to keep going with it, so you don't particularly need to worry about it much at all. Although, if you're aiming for a real high score, it will stop and make you think on your tile placements a lot more. So it has a nice balance of ease and challenge overall.

In Early Access the developers plan to continue building it up over the next year to include more biomes (there's three currently) with unique ecosystems, flora, fauna and so on. They also want to add in more puzzles and challenges to deepen the gameplay overall which sounds great. They have a truly wonderful start here, I can't wait to see more from it.

Available to buy from:

Humble Store

Steam