About This Demo

A small living experiment on your desktop

Try Photoncytosis with no time limit. Begin with a single cell, guide it toward the light of your screen, and watch a colony grow while you work. Your desktop becomes its habitat: bright pixels provide energy, while the colors it absorbs influence activity, growth, and perception.

What's included in the demo

• The desktop life simulation, with growing organisms, connected cell energy reserves, and specialized cell roles.
  
• The microscope and cell guide: inspect individual cells, their charge, age, and color compounds.
  
• Desktop habitats: drag your creature toward useful light or confine it to an application window.
  
• Encounters with other organisms, including attack and defense cells, infection, cures, and recovery.
  
• Tutorials and the return report, which summarizes changes while the simulation is running.
  
• Local saves so you can close the demo and continue your experiment later on the same PC.

Explore the first research tier

Earn up to six research points and explore Tier 1 of all six mutation paths:

• Efficient Photosynthesis
  
• Energy Reserves
  
• Cellular Longevity
  
• Efficient Movement
  
• Persistent Defenders
  
• Aggressive Invaders

These first adaptations include opportunities for rare Battery, Collector, Repair, and Muscle cells. Choose how to develop your organism, then observe how its body responds to changing conditions. Research, specialization, and survival happen through play; rare cells are not guaranteed to appear immediately.

Build a starting genome

Sequence four DNA genes: Priority Relay, Focused Collection, Directional Recruitment, and Lightward Budding. Choose genes for your next subject in Genome Setup, with three genome capacity. Selected genes express at birth and remain fixed for that experiment.

Complete five colony goals

The demo gives you a small checklist to guide your experiments:

• Keep a player organism alive for five biological minutes.
  
• Grow eight healthy player cells.
  
• Complete any research.
  
• Sequence a DNA gene in the permanent lab.
  
• Observe an inherited gene working in a new subject.

Earned goals stay completed across demo experiments, even after a colony is lost. Finish the checklist to see your summary, then keep playing for as long as you like.

Developing a specialized cell and recovering energy or overcoming infection are optional discoveries.

Demo and full game

The demo includes the first research tier and six earned research points. Tiers 2 and 3 can be inspected in the research tree, but their purchases and plans are available in the full game. Growth and simulation continue after the demo's research is complete.

Demo saves are separate from the full game and do not carry over. Photoncytosis uses mouse and keyboard on the Windows desktop.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Marketing materials are created using AI.