Obbe Vermeij is best known as a Rockstar veteran who served as a technical director on the classic PS2 Grand Theft Auto trilogy and GTA 4. But his days at Rockstar are long past, and he’s spent the past few years working on something completely different: a sandbox game that, despite the implications younger gamers seem to be taking from its low-fi, blocky visuals, is nothing like Minecraft.
“After 3 years of work, it’s finally here,” Vermeij said on Twitter alongside the game’s May 5 launch. “My new game Plentiful launched in Early Access today. It’s a sandbox where every change has consequences – too many trees drain the water, one spark can burn everything. It’s a bit different – we’ll see what people make of it.”
This is an old-school god game sandbox, where you reshape the land as you create a world that can support whatever flora and fauna – including human tribes – you want. Here, everything’s built out of hexagons representing bits of the landscape, and tending the digital garden seems like a delightfully chill time. There’s even a demo you can try if you want to check it out for yourself.
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The inspirations from games like Populous are clear – Vermeij says the similarities are “not a coincidence” because “Populous is my favourite game of all time.” But we live in a world where a cadre of presumably young gamers see a landscape made out of geometric shapes and can only think of Minecraft.
Multiple people in the replies to Vermeij’s announcement have described the game as simply Minecraft with hexagons, which he’s gently responded to with variations on the same joke: “Hexagons yes. Minecraft no. The game’s completely different. For starters, no Steve.”
Plentiful’s lack of Steve is genuinely a pretty key distinction, since you don’t have an in-game avatar at all, and instead impose your will on the world through the simple power of a mouse cursor. I’d like to think that kind of distinction would be obvious, but I guess Minecraft is just the Boss Baby of the video game world these days. And here I thought it was Dark Souls.
If you’re looking for some actual games like Minecraft, you know where to click.
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