Life Below preview: Call up the turtle defense force in this magically-real marine city-builder

A recent trend in city-builders has let genre representatives emerge that mix up the formula with a departure from its exploitative roots, such as Beyond These Stars, which is about empathy as much as it is about optimizing production chains. Yet another representative of this wave is Life Below, the upcoming game from Megapop. Instead of settling and exploiting the ocean, this title has you assist the sea goddess with restoring the flora and fauna of damaged reefs as part of a story written by Rhianna Pratchett (Overlord, Mirror’s Edge, Tomb Raider).

At Gamescom 2025, I got an in-depth look at the game with Lise Hagen Lie, the game director, and Jørgen Tharaldsen, the Norwegian studio’s CEO, guiding me through the title.

A key word the developers used when leading me through the game was “magical realism” as a descriptor of its style, because obviously we don’t have cute sea fairies that go around planting seagrass and answer to a semi-divine reef guardian. However, the team has extensively spoken with marine biologists to understand what creatures and relationships exist in these delicate, complex ecosystems, so everything depicted in the game has some scientific background.

Thalassa – the guardian – and the water sprites are based on the important zooplankton and phytoplankton, which form part of the backbone of many marine ecosystems.

Authenticity was further helped along by Pratchett, who’s an avid diver and once spotted that the team had used a freshwater fish in an early version of one of its trailers — talk about finding the right person to write your game.

This magical realism ensures that there’s always a connection to what’s happening in our seas today, but makes it “a bit more understandable for us,” as Hagen Lie says. Both developers tell me that Life Below isn’t intended as an accusation. It doesn’t hold up a mirror and makes users feel guilty about destroying the oceans. It simply presents that process as happening — but it’s different to the real world in one crucial aspect.

“It’s a story of hope,” Tharaldsen says. “You can actually do something about it, but it's gonna be tough. [...] You never see the humans, so there’s no pointy finger. It’s something that happens in the ocean. What are you going to do about it?”

The magical realism approach informs many aspects of the game, from resources you gather to buildings you can construct. Pearls, for example, have been chosen as a resource due to clams being such an important contributor to the health of coral reefs in the real world.

Life Below starts you off in a single region, a couple of workers, and the heart of your reef. This is a building with a health bar and it will take damage from disasters or extreme environmental conditions. If this building is destroyed, it’s game over. Every region is part of a specific biome with its own environment. They have different pH values and temperatures. Building space is limited in every region, so players need to decide which buildings are best placed where.

As you expand your reef, you buy access to new regions and stabilize their environment. There is an energy grid equivalent, making you plan out connection points. Despite its friendly vibes and relaxing tone, Life Below aims to deliver gameplay that will satisfy genre veterans just as much as newcomers.

The narrative is told through missions provided by lost water sprites, so there’s a mechanical as well as a narrative incentive to keep expanding your reef.

Because some structures affect aspects like temperature and pH value, balancing your regions is a key to success — and since all biomes are a little different, the solution to this puzzle looks different for all of them. It also provides opportunities to specialize: A cold region is perfect as a powerplant of sorts, since buildings that generate energy also increase a region’s heat. With the base temperature being low, you can build a lot more of these energy generators before there’s a necessity to correct the temperature downwards with some other building, using up space.

Building synergies, on the other hand, are not part of this equation yet. “It’s one of the things we considered when we were making the core design, but when we saw how things work in real life it didn’t seem like a thematic fit,” Hagen Lie explains. “But it could be a potential way to complicate things down the line.”

Naturally, plans, corals, and clams are only half the deal. A thriving ecosystem needs a bit more wildlife. And that’s another massive consideration to keep in mind when building infrastructure, as every species has different needs and environmental requirements. Biodiversity is a crucial resource in the game, as it enables technological progress, so you want as many species as possible to live in your fledgling marine utopia.

Aside from increasing your Biodiversity, some species have additional effects. The world of Life Below is not static. Dangers for your reef sometimes flare up in various forms, from heatwaves over an influx of trash to invasions of jellyfish. Some of these dangers you can only weather and then rebuild afterwards, but some you can counter. Take the jellyfish, for instance. They might snack on everything smaller than them in their path, but you can snack back — with turtles.

Putting your turtle defense force in their way minimizes the damage jellyfish can do to you and there are various other such interactions. Naturally, it’s not easy to attract and house turtles, so you can’t do it in every region. But Life Below has the option of forced migrations, allowing you to resettle animals. Even if the target region doesn’t fulfill all their needs, they’ll stick around for a bit, giving you some flexibility in regards to defending threats. Alternatively, the feature can be used to temporarily migrate your species out of harm’s way.

“The whole event system is dynamic in nature as well,” Tharaldsen says. “Things will happen based on what you’re doing and how your game is evolving, so it’ll feel different every time you play it.”

Attracting advanced species requires you to engage with another core system: crafting. It’s not as tedious as the word makes it sound. You simply choose a recipe and your workers will craft bait, hopefully netting you some new neighbors. There’s even a visitor system, so you can get animals like dolphins or sharks to show up for a while (and eat unwelcome hazards), even if they won’t stay permanently.

There is no “natural” population growth in the game, so baiting species is the best way to gain inhabitants. “What is multiplying or growing,” Tharaldsen adds, “are the corals themselves. Not as a gameplay effect, but as a visual effect.”

Players looking to get a dose of oceanic happiness can switch into the wildlife view, which stops time for all gameplay processes and simply lets you wander through your bustling coral colony. “It’s the space between the strategy and the garden,” Hagen Lie sums up. The developers plan on adding some cute interactions to this view as well, causing animals to react when you click on them. On the flipside, zooming all the way out produces a neat strategic overview of the map to make expansion planning easier.

Megapop puts a lot of effort into making the ocean feel authentic. When whales swim above the reef, you’ll see their shadows pass by and hear their songs — actual whale songs. “We got it all from the UK and global sound databases for the ocean,” Tharaldsen explains. Additionally, a Norwegian researcher working in this field curated her favorite whale songs for the game. “The players will never know, but all the sounds you hear are actually like you’d hear them in a real coral reef.”

Hagen Lie adds that Megapop’s sound designer tried to find recordings for all the species that are featured in the game and tried to recreate the sounds herself to fit the game’s style. Where no information was available, she researched which muscles the animals use to make sounds, creating their sounds from scratch based on this research. “She’s been sending us videos of the bathtub in her apartment with all these sounds and her dropping things,” Tharaldsen laughs.

If you needed another reason to do your best to nurse and protect the reef, this meticulous and passionate effort should give you one.

“It’s a game, but we hope that these kinds of details and grounding on reality makes the experience feel fuller and it becomes more fun that way,” Tharaldsen concludes.

Life Below is set to come to PC, but does not have a release date yet. You can already play a free demo of the game on Steam.

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