Habitat gives you a tiny, grid based world that you need to take care of and build, to create your own little world. There are a few different ways to interact with the tiles, and at the end of each day you can watch how your decisions affected the world, before starting on the next day. Habitat has a bunch of different goals in Quest mode, which start off as a tutorial so you can unlock more things to do. There are three free play modes as well, which have different sizes to play around with.
In Habitat, you start off with the ability to plant some food for the people walking around your land. There are different numbers on the tiles around your map, showing how fertile the land is. If you plant wheat on the greenest land, with a 3 on it, you will get three bits of wheat. If you plant it on a tile that says 1, which is very brown, you will only get one wheat. The use of the land will be something you really need to think about.
Once you have planted a wheat plant, for example, the next day you will harvest and be unable to use that tile to do anything in the next day. It’s the same when you cut down a tree; then the tile is just a stump until the next day. During your day you do have unlimited moves, as well as different stats at the top of the screen to show if you have enough food for the next day.
Planting trees will help bring the tiles near them back to health, however, they will also bring bears. Bears stomp wheat, but can be shot if they go near houses and used for food. Quickly, Habitat becomes a balancing act where you do not want to do too much in your world per round and want to spend some time thinking ahead. You can start to build up houses, have children, and continue to grow your land – but challenging quests will appear, like cutting down all the trees – which result in the earth not being too happy! You’ll need to balance your world and choose your moves wisely. Once your world crumbles, you will be given a score depending on how well you did.
You can play Habitat for free, in your browser or on your Android device.