Statistically speaking, and based on factual data provided by real scientists — telling friends and family about The Universim makes you a better person.
— A Loading Screen message
The Universim is a God Game developed by Crytivo and released on Steam. It entered early access in August 2018 and was fully released on 22 January 2024.
As the creator, it's your job to guide a civilisation of people called Nuggets from the Stone Age to the Space Age by researching technologies, instructing them to build buildings, and helping them with your creator powers. Or you can kill them with natural disasters. The choice is yours.
This game provides examples of:
- Adam and Eve Plot: Every playthrough starts with two Nuggets. The male is called Adahy and the female is called Elu.
- Adjustable Censorship: You can change the colour of the "juice" that squirts out of Nuggets when they die, or disable it altogether. The default is red.
- Artificial Stupidity: Nuggets will keep drinking directly out of lakes and falling ill even when you have plenty of reservoirs.
- Bland-Name Product: The sidequest associated with the courier building is about a company called Mammozon, owned by Neff Nuggszos.
- Floating Limbs: The Nuggets have detached heads and hands, and no legs.
- A God Is You: The game puts you in the role of a creator who guides a civilisation through the ages. You can influence the world using creator powers, which makes more Nuggets believe in you.
- Hamster-Wheel Power: One of the electricity generators in is a giant hamster wheel that Nuggets must run in.
- The Internet Is for Porn: The description for electricity jokes that Nuggets will end up using it to share pictures of their genitals.
- Portmantitle: It's short for "universe simulation".
- Realistic Species, Cartoony Species: The human-like Nuggets are very simple, with Floating Limbs and no faces. In contrast, the various wild animals are more detailed and realistically-proportioned.
- Schizo Tech: Your civilisation progresses to the medieval age after you unlock electricity.
- Shout-Out: One of the posters that can appear on the side of a skyscraper depicts Nugget versions of Rick and Morty, and occasionally they'll visit your planet through a portal.
- Tech Tree: A central mechanic of the game is the research menu. Whenever you click on a node, you'll have to wait for a few minutes as your Nuggets research it. Once it's done, you'll unlock perks such as new types of buildings or increases to the Nuggets' stats. You can queue up to five items at a time, and a few have additional prerequisites.
- Terraform: Once your Nuggets enter the Space Age, you can unlock several buildings that make planets more hospitable to life. Hydro-colliders create water, oxygen and cloud generators create an atmosphere, and terraformers change the surrounding terrain into grassland.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Your creator powers include summoning fire, lighting, and tornadoes.
- You Require More Vespene Gas: The most basic materials are stone and wood, which Nuggets can gather directly, though you later unlock buildings that makes gathering them quicker. The other basic resources — water, iron, natural gas, oil, and unobtainium — all require buildings in order to extract them. All of these can be refined into more complex resources, and there's only a finite amount of them on each planet. There are also several electricity generators, with varying degrees of efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions.
