Eugenics

Eugenics is a satirical life and social simulation game set in a near-future world where advanced genetic engineering technology like CRISPR is commonplace. Players take on the role of a scientist tasked with manipulating the human genome to create ‘improved’ children for clients, enhancing traits like intelligence and physical capabilities while navigating the moral and political implications of their work. The game explores the darkly comedic and ethical dilemmas posed by a reality where designing babies is a commercial service.

Eugenics: A Review

Introduction

In the pantheon of video games that dare to confront the player with uncomfortable moral and scientific dilemmas, few titles are as audaciously named or as conceptually fraught as Eugenics. Developed by La Belle Games and Mi-Clos Studio and released in 2019, this simulation game plunges players into the role of a genetic demiurge, tasked with sculpting the perfect society through the manipulation of human DNA. Its very title, a word irrevocably stained by its association with some of humanity’s darkest historical chapters, is a bold and deliberate provocation. This review posits that Eugenics is a fascinating, deeply flawed, and ultimately significant artifact—a game whose ambition to use satire as a scalpel for dissecting contemporary bioethical issues is undercut by its own mechanical opacity and a commercial fate that left it languishing in obscurity. It is a game that demands to be analyzed not just for what it is, but for what it attempted to be: a piece of interactive commentary in an era of rapid genetic advancement.

Development History & Context

Eugenics emerged from the independent development ethos of French studio Mi-Clos Studio, known for thoughtful, systems-driven games like Out There, and La Belle Games. Their vision, as articulated on their website, was not to trivialize history but to hold a darkly comedic mirror to a very present and accelerating reality. The developers cited the real-world emergence of CRISPR technology and the 2018 scandal of Chinese researcher He Jiankui creating the first gene-edited babies as direct inspirations. They asked a question that was moving from the pages of The Economist into the realm of possibility: what happens when this power becomes mundane, a tool for consumer choice rather than just medical necessity?

The gaming landscape of 2019 was ripe for such a title. It was a period that saw the continued maturation of indie games as a vehicle for serious discourse, following in the footsteps of critically acclaimed titles like Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, which the developers explicitly referenced as an influence. Eugenics aimed to occupy a similar space, using game mechanics to force engagement with complex socio-political themes. Built on the Unity engine, the game was not constrained by the need for cutting-edge graphics; instead, its technological focus was on creating a systemic “sandbox” where player choices would ripple through a simulated society. The developers described their goal as creating a “pop dystopia,” drawing tonal inspiration from the absurdist satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove rather than the bleak cyberpunk of Black Mirror. This choice to approach a harrowing subject with irony and a “hypercute” art style was a deliberate and risky creative gamble.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The narrative framework of Eugenics is intentionally skeletal, serving primarily to contextualize its amoral gameplay. The player is an employee of a nebulous corporation, operating from the shadows within the UT-OP-I4 colony (a painfully obvious pun on “Utopia”). Citizens have willingly entered this experiment seeking harmony, blissfully unaware that their and their children’s genomes are playthings for the player’s whims. You are the “demiurge,” a “servant of humanity” tasked with deciphering genetics to “show us the way.”

This setup is the game’s first and most potent piece of satire. It immediately establishes the hypocrisy and paternalistic arrogance of a system that seeks perfection through coercion, all under the banner of service. The narrative isn’t delivered through cutscenes or extensive dialogue but through the outcomes of your actions and the brief, often absurd, mission briefings from your corporate overlords. These missions might task you with creating a population resistant to a specific disease, maximizing economic productivity, or simply following the latest genetic “fashion.”

The true narrative weight is carried by the themes, which are devastatingly relevant. The game explores:
* The Commodification of Life: Genes are presented as unlockable perks to be mixed and matched. The potential for a free-market eugenics, where genetic advantages are sold to the highest bidder, is a central, terrifying implication.
* The Illusion of Choice: The colonists believe they are free, but their very essence is being engineered. This mirrors modern anxieties about how data and biotechnology could be used to manipulate and control populations without their explicit knowledge.
* The Banality of Evil: The game’s cute aesthetics and clinical interface deliberately detach the player from the horrifying implications of their actions. You’re not splicing genes with bloody tools; you’re clicking colorful icons, a chilling digital abstraction of a real-world ethical nightmare.
* Unintended Consequences: The satire is sharpest here. The game promises you can create a “hypercapitalist society” or one where “artists have taken power” by activating corresponding genes. This reductio ad absurdum highlights the naive, hubristic belief that complex societal traits can be boiled down to simple genetic switches.

However, the narrative lacks the character-driven punch of its inspiration, Papers, Please. Where that game made you feel the weight of your decisions through the desperate faces of immigrants, Eugenics operates on a cold, statistical level. The colonists are generic sprites; their “lives of their own” feel more like systemic routines than compelling stories. This emotional distance is likely intentional, reflecting the coldness of the subject matter, but it risks making the thematic commentary feel academic rather than visceral.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

At its core, Eugenics is a puzzle game disguised as a society simulator. The developers accurately compare its central loop to the board game Mastermind. The player’s primary interaction is with a representation of the human genome, a sequence of slots into which various “genes” must be placed.

The gameplay is bifurcated into two phases:
1. Discovery: Initially, genes are unknown. The player must activate random gene sequences in newly born colonists and observe the results. Does this combination make the colonist aggressive? Productive? Artistic? A pacifist? This process of trial-and-error is the game’s key innovative mechanic. It forces the player to engage in the scientific method, forming hypotheses and testing them, albeit with a living population.
2. Manipulation: Once genes and their effects are identified, the player can deliberately engineer newborns to meet specific goals set by the corporation (or their own whims). This is where the game transitions into a strategic resource management puzzle, balancing the demands of your employer against the stability and needs of the colony.

This design is conceptually brilliant but fraught with executional issues, as hinted at by the sparse player discussions on Steam. The learning curve is punishingly steep. The feedback loop between gene activation and observable effect is often vague and delayed. A player’s question on the forum—”Unclear of winning conditions Experiment 5A”—exemplifies the confusion. The game provides a “great freedom to the player, without moral compass,” but this lack of guidance can easily lead to frustration rather than thoughtful experimentation.

The UI is functional but sterile, presenting data on colonist stats and colony health without much flair. The “free mode” with dozens of missions and achievements suggests a game with high replay value, but the opaque mechanics likely prevented most players from ever experiencing it. The potential for deep, emergent storytelling through systems is there—imagine engineering a race of ultra-capitalists only for them to hoard resources and collapse the colony—but the game seems to lack the depth of simulation required to make these outcomes feel like a coherent narrative rather than statistical failure.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Eugenics employs a stark aesthetic dichotomy to reinforce its satirical themes. The art direction is described as “dystopian and hypercute,” a deliberate choice to create cognitive dissonance. The colonists are likely rendered as simple, perhaps even charming, characters, living in a clean, bright, utopian-looking colony. This stands in stark contrast to the grim reality of their existence as lab rats. It’s a “pop dystopia” where horror is wrapped in a candy-colored shell, much like the satirical presentation in Dr. Strangelove where the end of the world is accompanied by a cheerful musical number.

This style is a double-edged sword. It successfully creates a unique and memorable identity and reinforces the theme of banal evil. However, it also risks softening the impact of its subject matter to the point of being dismissed as trivial or quirky. The sound design likely follows suit, using sterile, scientific sound effects for the gene manipulation interface juxtaposed with innocuous, perhaps even cheerful, ambient music for the colony view, further deepening the unsettling atmosphere.

The world-building is minimal beyond the core premise. The UT-OP-I4 colony exists in a vacuum, with no greater world context beyond the cryptic demands of the corporation that employs you. This focuses the player entirely on the micro-scale ethical experiment but can make the world feel underdeveloped and abstract.

Reception & Legacy

Eugenics was released not with a bang, but with a whisper. The most telling data point is from MobyGames and Metacritic: there are no critic reviews and no user reviews documented for the title. Its Steam community hub is a ghost town, with a handful of technical support questions and a single post praising its potential amid complaints about unclear objectives. One user’s glib question, “is this sponsored by planned parenthood by chance,” underscores the immense challenge and risk of its title, instantly diverting discussion away from its intended satire and toward inflammatory real-world debates.

Commercially and critically, Eugenics vanished upon arrival. It was a commercial failure, failing to capture the audience that embraced similar high-concept indie sims. Its legacy is not one of influence but of caution. It serves as a case study in the extreme difficulty of marketing a game with such a loaded title and the challenges of designing engaging gameplay around a deliberately opaque and morally repugnant central mechanic.

However, to dismiss it entirely would be a mistake. Eugenics stands as a brave, if unsuccessful, attempt to grapple with a coming ethical tsunami. It belongs to a small but important lineage of games like BioShock (which it references) that use the medium to question utopian ideals and the price of perfection. Its legacy is that it even exists—a game that looked at CRISPR and the looming era of consumer genetics and decided to build a playable satire around it long before these issues become mainstream conversation. It is a fascinating footnote in the history of games as social commentary.

Conclusion

Eugenics is a game of profound ambition and equally profound flaws. Its conceptual brilliance—using the Mastermind puzzle format to simulate the terrifying trial-and-error of genetic experimentation—is undermined by an implementation that is more frustrating than illuminating. Its satirical vision of a “pop dystopia” is clever but struggles to connect on an emotional level, leaving its commentary feeling cold and academic. Its most defining feature, its name, ultimately proved to be an insurmountable barrier to finding an audience, ensuring its descent into obscurity.

Yet, it remains an important artifact. It is a game that looked directly at one of the most consequential technologies of the 21st century and asked players to engage with its ethical implications through interactivity, not just passive observation. It failed, but it failed while trying to do something genuinely novel and intellectually fearless. For historians of game design and scholars interested in the medium’s potential for social critique, Eugenics is a worthy subject of study. For the average player, it remains a challenging, often confusing, and ethically uncomfortable curiosity—a bold but flawed experiment in its own right.