Creatures Caves

Hello, hello! I've been popping into the community once in a while for the past year... My interests tend to come and go in waves, so I can't promise I'll be an active part of the community. But I figure that at the very least, I should introduce myself.

Truthfully, I missed the great renaissance of Creatures. The only game I owned as a kid was one of the Playstation games, and I kinda...had a freakout because I panicked and cried over the thought that maybe I was going to let these cute creature suffer and die if I wasn't good enough for them, all of which culminating in me selling off the game. I was a strange child.

Somehow I still ended up keeping the manual, though, and I kept reading and rereading it - in spite of my fears, I still found the idea of artificial life to be very fascinating! In later years I learned that this was only scratching the surface, and there was so much more depth in the PC games, but I was still too young to really appreciate it. In the end, I missed the boat on games 1-3, and I decided I'd just wait for Creatures 4 to come out. (hahahaHAHA.)

It wasn't until a year ago that I finally sat down to actually play Creatures. I remembered the series while I was working on something for a collaborative writing group. One of the protagonists had just been revealed to be an android and the other heroes were debating whether or not he was a living, thinking being with a soul. And as I tried to think of what my character might say, I remembered some really old debates about Creatures! I decided to look up the games again to see if any major news had happened recently, one thing led to another, and... I ended up buying Exodus!

(For the record, I decided that a language barrier would have deterred my easily-distracted character from doing anything more than playing Docking Station for a week. I'm considering creating another character who's an artificial-life designer, though, so Creatures will be a huge inspiration in his design.)

I've been playing on and off since then, usually in Wolfling/Feral formats. I'm still in love with, above all other aspects to the series, all the potential and details. I don't recall ever hearing about any other game with this much attention to biochemistry. It's always so fascinating to me when I get a strange mutation that spreads through the population and affects how they live out their lives.