I’ll spoil one: 'Sneak into the red nest and dig lots of deep holes. Pages 63-65 of SimAnt’s manual outlined outrageously detailed ways to cheese the game. Usually in games you have a clearly defined character, whether a witcher or an arctic fox, but there’s a different kind of agency to being, as SimAnt’s manual describes it, 'the intelligence of a colony'. Vengeance is a helpful motivation to have as a mass of crawling insects. I don’t know how Empires will play out, but I’d like to ruin some scientists’ lunches, perhaps carelessly left next to the formicarium.

After he carelessly squished one too many of my brave soldier ants, it was time to turn his stupid, blue house into a swarming mess. It’s like in SimAnt, when I first zoomed out to the yard and saw a man stomping around, complaining about food.

My motivation for beating Empires of the Undergrowth is now to exact revenge. The first time I tried one, my queen was casually destroyed (to increasingly dissonant piano music). To unlock more missions, you test the formicarium against unpredictable, hilarious, and infuriating challenges. On completion of missions (narrated by a documentary filmmaker, who delivers what functions as both commentary and instruction), the player can use royal jelly to specialize new ants via a tech tree, as if they were assimilating DNA.Ī mission concludes, and you return to the laboratory’s formicarium to continue developing the persistent colony. Empires’ premise is that scientists have discovered a new species of ant that can steal genetic material from its foes-Formica ereptor.

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