Find your place in Pine's ecosystem of intelligent animals
Luckily it doesn't look like you can be eaten by a catfish
Open world ecological simulation Pine drops you in the shoes* of a human who lives among intelligent animals, and asks you to carve out your own niche. You’ll have to figure out how to navigate the world, craft what you need, and generally survive. And also not get stepped on by a bipedal mammoth. Take a look at the launch trailer below.
*He's actually barefoot, which is surely a recipe for splinters and stubbed toes.
I’ve fallen down a hole trying to figure out how much Pine’s world, which is described as a place where “humans never reached the top of the food chain,” ignores the fact that humans aren’t at the top of the food chain anyway. Trophic level is the ranking by which we measure that sort of thing, and humans rank around the same spot as pigs, as creatures who typically eat both meat and plants but more of the latter.
But Wikipedia also has a list of creatures known to hunt humans when they get the chance, which includes unsurprising entries like most of the big cats, and also Komodo dragons and catfish?
Anyway, in Pine humans are even less at the top of the food chain, and animals have their own agendas that’ll play out regardless of your input. You can chat with them, barter, or fight, but even if you don’t, they’ll be getting on their merry way. And things have a knock-on effect, again, like in the real world, where you accidentally introduce, say, a more boring squirrel that outperforms the pretty one.
It’ll be hitting Steam and GOG for $25 on October the 10th, but there’s also a limited early access run happening now for $20 via Kartridge.