Little Kitty, Big City
Little Kitty, Big City
Game
Game2024
Ecosystem
Developer Tom Johnson
Create virtual lifeforms whose development is shaped by a deep simulation of evolution. Guide them as they fight, mate, and adapt to the environment you have built. All the creatures in the trailer evolved on their own in the game! From the Steam store page
189 reactions from 3 sources (Steam reviews, Bluesky, Mastodon) · newest Oct 7, 2026 · last updated Oct 8, 2026 · How this works
Audience score
71
Fresh
130 positive · 54 negative
95% range 64–77%
| Source | + | − | = |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam reviews | 130 | 54 | 0 |
| Bluesky * | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mastodon * | 0 | 0 | 0 |
* shown, not counted in the score (label accuracy below our 85% bar or not yet audited).
5 newer reactions are still waiting for a label.
Steam's own rating
Mostly Positive
488 of 638 reviews positive (all languages, per Valve)
What people are saying
Summary pending — the reactions are listed below.
Reactions
60 of 189 · most liked firstGame industry continues to be just incredibly bleak behind the scenes. Ecosystem is in free fall. Doubt there’ll be an easy solution, or a quick one. This darkest hour has dragged out to a darkest couple of years.
unlabelledView post →Ecosystem starts off strong: you plant some seaweed, unleash evolution… and then? You get sideways-sliding fish with flailing fins that seem to defy physics. The creatures evolve, sure, but often in ways that feel more awkward than awe-inspiring. And the creature editor? Like trying to build IKEA furniture without instructions—underwater. The concept is gold, but the execution ends up as a digital fish soup. A real shame, because this could’ve been something truly special.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is not a typical video game, think of it more like a science experiment. Like other Artificial Life games Ecosystem requires immense patience and is intended to be left in the background. Small changes can have drastic effects so focus primarily on observing and/or terraform your area FIRST and watch how life evolves in what you setup. Always save before you make a change so you can revert to when you made that change, that way you can even "fork' your save into multiple different…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →On the surface the game seems like it would be sick as hell, but sadly it just shoots itself in the foot in so many ways. Your limited by what you can do in terms of creature customization and mutations, once a species is a certain type it can't ever evolve past it's ecological role, forever a prey animal or a bottom feeder or a "whale" as the game calls it. There's also an inevitable effect where all your ecosystems look the same plants and all your fish with the jank joints and physics do a…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →the game is great, it's one of the few of these types of projects that focus' on physics and things like how shape and size affect movement, behaviors are learned from interactions/watching interactions occur from what I gather, meaning creatures will learn by sight and by doing, if that's not the case; I am completely blown away by the interactions and that should absolutely be something that should occur. Besides that, the game has a nice progression, nice feeling to building your ecosystem…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I was really excited about this game and I am sad that I don't like it. First off, the concept is right on the money. It is, in theory, everything you want in an ecosystem game but it has issue that ruin the fun of watching the creatures evolve. Let me say that the terrain and plant simulation is pretty awesome, that part is sweet. But the fish, they all flop around in ways that don't make sense. I don't mean a few weird random species. I mean EVERY fish flops around all weird. Even when you…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Ecosystem is a game built for a certain kind of player. It’s a true sandbox — there’s no traditional core loop because you create your own species and let time and evolution shape them into defensive tanks, agile predators, or whatever strange mayhem natural selection decides. Yes, plankton is a performance killer and will absolutely drop your FPS. It’s been that way for a while. But even with that, I can run around 250 fish at 2K resolution and still hold 60 FPS as long as plankton is off.…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Sadly disappointed. I was hoping this would a really cool evolution game, and maybe it is - but a steep learning curve coupled with one of the worst tutorials I have ever encountered turn this game more into an exercise in frustration than any kind of fun for the brain. The tutorial consists of popups of paragraphs that don't relate at all to what you are currently doing. For example, the game decided to show me the tutorial for creating a new creatures while I was out seeding plants, and the…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Promising, but buggy. It first appears to be Spore crossed with SimLife, if that were designed with science as a focus, and not as a child's game. What it turns out to be is SimAquarium. Which I'm fine with, since this is supposed to be a pretty chill game, planting coral and sea urchins looking for somewhere else that needs a bit more kelp fits the bill. Once you reach the limit of your aquarium, however - you research all the stuff, and you're reduced to spending points on sea shells…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This WOULD be a good game but everything is broken. The ui randomly unticks boxes you ticked the creature editor is the single worst thing i've ever seen, and when you're done, the creature you get is just straight up not the thing you made. it'll be changed to be paper thin or a different color or rotated 90 degrees. for perspective of how much work goes into making these fish that gets thrown away, symmetry is off by default for all creatures so every single one has their left half bear no…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Feels like a scam. I became very curious about this game since the store page is suggesting some evolution in an ecosystem. After 5 hours play time i can say, this is a nice Aquarium Builder for having a chilled screensaver on your television. The aspect of the ecosystem is plants being dropped in and spreading while being eaten by some kinda fish. The game's stats have the number of plants continuesly growing even while most is grazed off. Dropped in predators cannot swim and are the weakest…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I'm very interested in this type of game, but after trying out the creature editing system in this game, I was quite disappointed. Especially when I wanted to sculpt more details of the fish, I couldn't do anything at all. And when I wanted to add more rectangles to adjust the shape of my creature, they always connected in very strange ways. I originally wanted to use this game to replicate real fish, but now it seems impossible. I hope the production team can continue to optimize the creature…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Okay so in principle I'd love this game. But it's EXTREMELY poorly optimized even the small maps it uses run like absolute garbage the moment there's a few animals wandering around. And the animals look like polygon glitches in other games. Clearly the dev team tried to make too complex and realistic a situation without the technical skills to realize it. As a result the animals really don't look like animals. In short it's a good idea with a lot of potential utterly ruined my it's execution.…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Yet another evolution sim game that, despite being entirely underwater, completely misses out on almost every opportunity you could have with underwater life, AND is also extremely vertebrate biased. At this point it just feels like Species without the land biomes, and even that feels like I'm underselling Species. It's as if the devs conveniently forgot that there are any aquatic animals besides fish and sharks, which admittedly is an issue I see with a lot of evolution sims. But A: this whole…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It started out with a really promising concept, but once you jump into the game it quickly deteriorates. The controls are abysmal, there's no gameplay loop at all. The game really just has no point, and I usually love sandbox games.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →i think the idea of the game is really cool but nothing really happens and it gets very repetitive
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →My one consistent love of Xbox Ecosystem and game pass is the variety between games. Major W
unlabelledView post →This game is exactly as advertised and titled, a game where you can create your own little underwater ecosystem. You can create your own ocean currents. You can add plankton that float along these currents. You can add plants and coral that reproduce and expand across the ocean floor. You can add fish who forage, hunt, reproduce, mutate, play, and display a whole host of other unique behaviors. You can create massive underwater caves and mountains, flatten the ocean floor, or create deep…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Very cool game, excellent concept and incredible attention to detail, but crashes every 5 minutes at minimum settings despite an excellent computer due to overdraw of RAM and terrible optimization. Unfortunate, I would have loved this game.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The mechanics of this game are amazing and engaging for me, but it's actually impossible for me to load my saves. It takes a very, very long time just for the tiniest bit of loading progress. I literally finished an entire Better Call Saul episode (S4:E3) from start to finish before my game loaded, you can't make this up.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Although the idea is fun and right up my alley, it just crashes way too often on me... I'd be lucky to get a solid hour out of it before it crashes and having to manually save every time I do ANYTHING is thoroughly annoying, saving also crashed the game on me twice, just after I started losing my patience with it. It's not my PC just so we're clear it plays everything else perfectly fine. Also I found that very few of the creatures are actually capable of swimming, one of my games was…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I will try to keep this short and sweet, despite having a lot to say. This game is very complex and very simple at the same time. You can go super-detail oriented and design everything by scratch, or use presets just to relax and watch. The creatures can become very interesting and develop unique features and even modes of life. If youve ever imagined a game where you could create a mold an environment by hand and watch creatures learn and adapt to it; this is that game. In one of my save…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Love it. Been watching this stupid species for 39 generations now they got up to over 200 population at one point before a predator species hunted them to near extinction. They are currently at a healthy 40 population.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A peaceful evolution simulator, however a bit CPU and RAM hungry. Regardless, it's a very serene and enjoyable experience playing this game. I thoroughly enjoy the terrain editor tool and the current system. It's very fun creating underwater caves to explore.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Ecosystem – A Living, Evolving Sandbox of Science and Wonder ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ (4/5) Ecosystem is a one-of-a-kind evolution simulator where life itself is the core mechanic. Instead of controlling individual creatures or guiding species through predefined rules, players set up environmental conditions and let evolution take its course — all powered by neural networks and procedural generation. It’s like being the gardener of a digital world where life, truly, finds its own way. Gameplay and…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I love the idea. I really think it needs some optimization. I check up on the game from time to time. Often if not always I can't continue without a crash after closing a long game where much has grown. There's just too much going on. Very cool concept though. Id like to run it on a really powerful computer and see how it goes. Can't really endorse something that crashes when I try continue a game as much as do like playing it for the time I can before it gets overloaded. --------- Tried it on…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I love the concept and the gameplay wasn't even that bad if you know what you're getting into, however the game is soo poorly optimized that it was burning my computer up and sutttering quite a lot once things started going which is sad because i had just gotten multiple spieces in the system. It is pretty unplayable once that happens.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game looks promising on the surface and the soundtrack is really solid for the vibes that the game is going for, however, the game absolutely fails at giving any sort of meaningful gameplay at all. It presents itself as a realistic ecosystem creator and evolution simulator, yet it gives you very little to ♥♥♥♥ around with. The creature creator is abysmally limited for trying to even create more realistic and feasible creatures as well as being a pain in the ass to use. Everything either…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Can't recommend it in its current state. It's basically a map editor and there's not much variety in the way things evolve - the lumpy fish are funny at first, but the novelty wears off pretty fast. It has potential, and I can appreciate the amount of work that's gone into it, but this is a bit lacking for $20.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Its cool informatively, but honestly the game just looses frames after about 40-50 fish and in the later stages of your ecosystem it just looses all hope of running completely lmao. i dont think its worth 20$.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's pretty cool to have a modernized evolution simulator. Been a while since we had a good one. I like it a lot, but I do have a few issues. I definitely think you should be able to rename species, if there's a way then I haven't figured it out. Another issue is that there should be a way to name aquariums and save them under different save folders. Again, this might be something implemented that I just have figured out yet. The option to create smaller maps would be cool too, but I'm sure you…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →They should add the ability to make a land ecosystem for more variety of ones you can make.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →9/10. Amazing idea, addictive gameplay, has serious loading and graphics issues when the sim gets too big
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's interesting conceptually but the buggy unfinished UX kind of kills any potential enjoyment. These types of digital garden experiences live and die off of being kinaesthetically pleasing to interact with as software, most of your time in this game will be spent fighting with the camera or trying to decipher obtuse UI elements
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I can see why people love it. However, I wish I was more Steam Deck Friendly... If you do get this game, best you play it on a computer. I really hope they add more steam deck accessibility in the future.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Dont know how this game lags so bad even with a 5000 dollar custom pc and all the setting cranked super low.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Great game, keeps crashing too much. will update when crashing is fixed.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →While this can hardly be called a game in the traditional sense of the world, I've rarely been this impressed with a simulation as I have been with this one. Rather than controlling any creature directly, you have full control in shaping the environment and genetic pool in which the newborn species will compete with each other to feed and reproduce. Each individual creature has its own tiny brain and genetic make-up in its battle to reproduce and spawn children that can continue its line.…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Very smart game that engages on multiple levels. You can build the terrain from scratch and the plants interact with each other. The creatures are amazing - you can see their brains, species history, and status, to name a few things. It is also possible to follow each animal's perception through an integrated mini-camera. It is possible to build a complete underwater ecosystem with fish, predators, apex predators, crustaceans and plants. Definitely worth the money.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Just plain boring. Nothing entertaining happens, they just swim around and do nothing. The species dont even look pretty. They dont evolve fast enough to become better versions of themselves. No body parts that you place on them will be used as you intend.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →a decent idea, but just not good enough, poorly optimized, and fish dont really seem like fish
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →fun sandbox, really poorly optimized. runs terribly and seems like it isn't able to load saves.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →dont expect... sensible "evolution"... its not. the fish need lots of guidance to be... normal. what this game IS: its super chill. and a bit silly. thats about it. i got it for USD $8 on sale, worth it... $20 is a bit high for what this game offers.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →on my first run, i ran into crashing issues and my save file was unloadable. on a second run, i was cearful on how many creatures i spawned. look, on sale, yeah. but i payed full price ($29.50 AUD) and at that price point its a buggy s@#t game. if it was down to 5 dollars, it would be worth a look. otherwise wait.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is great fun for a while, "gardening" plants corals and creatures in a living ecosystem but it doesn't take that long before you unlock everything and fill the map. By then you've just about seen everything and the creatures that evolve always seem to be monstrosities. I think if they enforced symmetry they'd be less ugly.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The game's really cute and I do kind of enjoy it, but for all the emphasis on creativity and making interesting underwater worlds, you're still pretty stuck making the exact same environments over and over again. If you want to make a cool coral reef in the beachy shallows, you need to first make everything you DON'T want so that you can get enough points to buy what you DO want, then continue with what you don't want until you have enough points that you can bulldoze your entire ecosystem in…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Put me to sleep. I woke up to a crashed game. Who wants to watch the most god awful creatures swim around and evolve into even worse creatures than they already were? I wish I had never bought this.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I tried to like this game, it's very Zen but it's too hands off for what I was looking for. Buy it if you like idlers or want something to run while waiting on something else I guess.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This is a nice little time waster. This is the kind of game you have going while watching YouTube or something else. You place plants and watch them grow, then you place animals and watch them grow. You can design animals or let the game auto generate them. Then you sit back and see what happens. Dont let the negative views put you off. It is a fun and simple game but make sure you understand its just an evolution simulator without much for you to need to do before you get the game. If you get…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →its one of those chill game where you watch things grow and evolve :) not my cup of tea 5/10
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I remember many years ago, I bought a game called "Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox", this game kind of reminds me of it, but fills in the parts I thought were missing from that previous game, i.e. actual diversity in the species. Great fun if you like games where you set up a system and then just sit back and watch what happens.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Derpy/janky fish simulator. I really wish that I had paid more attention to the store page videos before purchase... Needs much more system spec than what is specified on the store page (I'm running AMD 5800x and 32gb RAM), if not stuttering then you deal with crashes when there's a few different large groups of species. Most importantly isn't as good as other aquarium sims that can be found for similar price, or even cheaper.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It is hard to look past the slow progression to unlock new creatures and plants when the game crashes multiple times per session. The game should not crash when running at 1x speed and clicking on a creature...
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's a pretty peaceful game where you either try to build a balanced ecosystem to get the highest score you can across a variety of different aquatic landscapes. But you can also play in sandbox mode to focus more on creating the silliest or coolest fishies you can come up with. It's pretty rewarding to see your critters grow as they learn to swim and adapt to their environment and the other creatures they live with.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Unfortunate that all saved games will not load (freezes during reload). So if the game crashes (which it seems to do every hour or so) you lose everything, otherwise great game.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →this game gets VERY laggy once you get a lot of things into each different area.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →While the game itself is fun to play, the lack of optimization leads to an abysmal experience.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →cool and fun game but i hope the crashing is fixed, you can be very creative with the creatures you make and its entertaining seeing the ecosystem you built move and behave.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →For some ungodly reason evetything either turns into a giant ♥♥♥♥ monster or a ten limbed monstrosity and i am all for it.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Pretty decent game. Although there are performance issues. So make sure to get a decently powerful computer. The evolution simulation is very well handled though.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →
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