Ask anyone what Minecraft is missing and they ll all tell you the same thing: an impending sense of climate doom, the pervasive fear of a warming globe that haunts the modern psyche like a crap ghost who keeps showing you scary looking graphs. Eco is an open world co-operative survival game that manages to do just that, incorporating that now-familiar sense of creeping dread which perches in our collective subconscious, and in our quietest moments reminds us that the planet is dying and that one day this hot, wet little space rock will boil over and turn back into mud, dissolving us all in the acidic stew that was once our oceans. So that s nice.

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This is like one of those jokes that work on Twitter but makes people really concerned if you write it on Facebook: “Anyone else feel like the planet is doomed and we should stop trying?” Like, your aunt would post a comment underneath asking if you were okay. The first time I played Eco, I chose a world that had been running for a few days, with a few active players. It seemed like a good idea, because they d have gotten a head start on stopping the meteor about to hit the planet, you see. I spawned in on a wide, flat plain with a few tents dotted around. The tutorial advised me to set up my camp near other buildings, so I d be able to take advantage of what the community had built so far.

I didn t realise then that the plain I was on was once a thick forest carpeted with wild fruits and vegetables; the deforestation had been curbed by the introduction of a tax on anyone but new players cutting down trees.

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Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser s joining a civilisation and facing down a meteor in environmentally-conscious sandbox Eco. But mostly he s building a terrible house. >

The worlds of crafting and survival games are big balls of resources waiting to be exploited. Normally. Not so in Eco, where the world is a vulnerable, reactive globe that requires respect and nurturing. And only a wee bit of exploitation. It looks like a pretty Minecraft, but while it shares most of its fundamentals, Eco is as much simulation as a crafting sandbox, complete with an ecosystem that can be irreparably destroyed by human interference.

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