Spectrum48’s Philip Sinclair has spent 15 years rewilding a field, “rewilding” being a process of restoring ecosystems to something like a state of ‘natural’ equilibrium. Now, he’s making a videogame about it. That game is Grow Wild, which is currently accepting playtest sign-ups. It sees you restoring biomes across the globe, touching down on sickly square arcadias like an avenging angel equipped with a trowel, magnifying glass, and probably some tartan-pattern slippers, out of shot.

It makes me think a little of Viva Pinata, but it’s populated by representations of non-digital creatures, flowers and trees with convincing growth cycles. There are some lovely ‘time lapse’ shots in the trailer, below.

Grow Wild is vaguely described in a press release as like “an idle city-builder + creature collector, but instead of creating the perfect conditions for humans, you’re creating them for animals”. The idea is both to entertain and to educate, natch.

“You grow the intricately simulated ecosystem from the ground up by planting trees and flowers, building rock/log piles, and digging ponds – attracting invertebrates (butterflies, spiders, bees), which attract their predators (birds, mice), which in turn attract bigger predators (sparrowhawks, foxes),” the press release goes on. There is pruning and photography and stickerbooking in store, as you travel across five biomes and 15 landscapes.

Your accomplice in this endeavour is “the exuberant Professor Vicky Sponge” – I’m guessing that’s the amicable lost soul in the trailer, blundering through the bushes. She looks pretty chilled out for a woman marooned on a tiny island of silverbirch, gazing out over a sea of rolling graph paper.

I find the game’s extremely contained, hermetically sealed ‘natural spaces’ very eerie, at a glance – you could argue that there’s a kind of hopelessness in the focus on individuals rejuvenating exactly these and only these very small squares of land, jutting from void, rather than working with wider environmental factors that appear to have been abstracted away. Still, that’s a casual observation based on the trailer alone – it’s probable the game explores those wider connections in the descriptions of animals and plants. Also, Sinclair clearly doesn’t have the resources to render, like, whole river deltas and forests.

Oh no, wait, the person in the trailer could be Sid – “your enthusiastic nature-loving companion,” as the press release puts it, “who may occasionally scare off a butterfly”. Ah Sid. What a silly old sod. Given the talk of creature collection, I feel like there’s some latent PvP multiplayer potential here. I want to be bumbling interloper Sid, absently plonking my buttocks on a basking Heath Fritillary, while the other player charges across the clearing in a berserker rage, hellbent on watering the petunias with my lifeblood.

If you don’t make the cut for the Grow Wild playtest, there’s a demo launching on Steam on 17th April. Read more about it on Steam. Are you a real-life rewilder? I myself have an allotment which I am carefully rewilding by ignoring completely.