Sustainability Week 2025
This article is part of a series of sustainability-themed articles we’re running to observe Earth Day 2025 and promote more sustainable practices. Check out all of our Sustainability Week 2025 content.
When you think of educational games, you may have flashbacks to designated computer time in school, playing Jump Start and Math Blasters on an old CRT. But games and technology have come a long way since then, and we can now learn about everything from history to literacy – perhaps without even knowing it.
Sustainability-themed games are a brilliant example of this. Whether putting us in charge of geopolitics, tasking us with balancing the fine line between the needs of man and nature, or teaching us the ins and outs of green living, sustainability games don’t have to be dull. So, we’ve picked seven great sustainability-themed games that make learning fun.
Terra Nil
Terra Nil is a beautiful, relaxed city builder that tasks you with transforming a barren landscape into a thriving ecosystem. Unlike most city builders, which often encourage you to expand your realm and build bigger and better structures, your goal in Terra Nil is to create a sustainable, flourishing environment for the world’s wildlife.
In this strategy puzzle game, you must purify the soil, clean polluted oceans, recycle old buildings, and plant trees, creating clean new habitats that encourage new animal residents. Once you’ve balanced and nurtured your landscape accordingly, you leave it (and its new inhabitants) in peace.
Each landscape is procedurally generated, with each presenting its own challenges, meaning each no playthrough of Terra Nil is the same. It’s a big job, but thanks to the game’s chill music and stunning hand-painted environments, it’s a delightful one.
Eco
While Terra Nil focuses on creating clean habitats for wildlife, Strange Loop Games’ Eco emphasizes the balance between man and nature. Still in early access, this sandbox simulator sees you building a civilization of people who must work together to stop a meteor – without damaging the world’s ecosystem.
Eco is probably the most realistic sustainability-themed game on our list. Built on a rich ecological simulation, every action you take has a consequence you see play out in your world. You must build structures, towns, infrastructure, farms, and more to expand and evolve your society, but the simulation will provide you with data on how that growth has impacted the world around you.
Using this data, you can propose legislation to restrict harmful practices. Protecting the environment isn’t that simple, however; you must balance the ecosystem’s needs with those of your people and the player community (if you play online multiplayer), making this a tough and eye-opening challenge.
Minecraft Sustainability City
Minecraft’s Sustainability City is less of a game and more of an educational tool, but it’s a great way to get younger people interested in sustainability.
Included in Minecraft: Education Edition, Sustainability City is a Minecraft world that lets you explore a sustainable neighborhood that aims to teach you about six key elements of a sustainable city: food production, water treatment, green building, sustainable forestry, energy-efficient homes, and the power grid. To learn about each of these, you visit various locations to learn more about the processes involved in making them sustainable. For example, learning about food production sees you boarding a green bus to a composting facility to learn about biosolids and windrow turners, heading to a farm to find out about crop rotation, compost spreading, and more, and visiting a recycling plant to see how recycling works.
Sustainability City is a great way to visually teach kids about the basics of sustainability – and adults could learn a thing or two, too.
Reus
Reus is a strategy sim in which you control god-like giants who can terraform planets to their will. Your aim is to build a flourishing world by creating various terrains, like oceans and forests, and enriching your planet with minerals, plants, and wildlife. There’s just one problem: humans. You can’t control what mankind will do, so you must work with them to ensure the planet’s sustainability – whether you do this by an iron fist, working alongside them, or the carrot-and-stick method is up to you.
Like Eco, this game emphasizes the challenge of creating sustainable ecosystems that work for humans and nature.
The Fish Game
Created by The Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education, The Fish Game is used by the institute to educate about system dynamics, ecological principles, and responsible citizenship.
This browser-based simulation game sees you taking on the role of a fisherman who, alongside other fishermen/players, makes a living from catching fish, each worth $2. You play through four fishing scenarios with different rules, for example, scenario one cements that each person must choose a fishing technique and stick to it throughout the round. The goal is to have the most fish at the end of your scenario’s 10 turns.
The point of this game isn’t necessarily to “win,” in fact, the institute states that most people fail at least one scenario. This game emphasizes sustainability in practice and how challenging it is to balance our individual needs versus an ecosystem’s needs. It’s also a good way to understand the problem with overfishing in a more simplified way.
Fate of the World
Fate of the World may look dated by modern standards, but this global strategy sim’s simplicity is where its power lies. You’re a political leader, faced with managing disastrous scenarios that require you to make tough decisions and balance the climate crisis with an ever-growing world population that needs increasingly more resources. While this game is a bit older, it covers possible futures from 2020 to 2200, utilizing real-world data on scenarios that could really play out.
This turn-based sim is by no means a relaxing game. You must aim to save animal species, avoid world-changing events, enable policies, and combat environmental disasters like storms, floods, and heat waves. It’s a pretty bleak – but realistic – look at the climate crisis that will stick with you.
Equilinox
Now for something a bit more relaxing. Equilinox is a beautiful, atmospheric sandbox sim that lets you build your own thriving ecosystems – but without pesky humans. You create and nurture your own world, cultivating and raising new species of flora and fauna and designing it to your liking.
Unlike most games on this list, Equilinox isn’t the most realistic. You can create genetically modified animals, like rainbow sheep and pink wolves, and bizarre exotic plants. There’s also no real threat here. Equilinox instead emphasizes the importance of nourishing diverse ecosystems for plants and animals.
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