Japanese developer Attructure has announced that their sandbox life simulator game ANLIFE: Motion-Learning Life Evolution will launch on Steam on February 12. The title was originally announced back in 2023, and immediately drew attention for being by “those guys who pissed off Hayao Miyazaki.”
This is in reference to a viral TV program excerpt from 2016, in which Attructure CEO Masayoshi Nakamura presented his in-house artificial life simulation technology to the Ghibli director. The demo video used gory zombie-like models, which self-learned crawling motions using artificial intelligence. Miyazaki was enraged by the video and denounced the technology behind it, calling it extremely unpleasant and, famously, “an insult to life itself.”
Releasing a decade later, ANLIFE is a game that inherits the foundations of the same technology. You observe the activities of physics-driven block-shaped life forms from a god’s perspective. The virtual lifeforms learn to move from scratch and evolve to adapt to their environments, whether on land, underwater, or in the air. ANLIFE has no set goal or end result, the player simply becomes the “creator” of life, observing and meddling with the process of evolution.
In ANLIFE, the block lifeforms’ only behavioral principle is to move toward food. Creatures that learn to move effectively toward food will survive, reproduce, and pass on their traits. Thus, through each generation, their bodies will gradually evolve.
There are two types of food: food that induces inheritance of parental traits and food that induces mutations. Offspring of individuals that consume the former will inherit the parent’s basic body structure, though slight variations (fluctuations) occur in the size and position of each block. Conversely, individuals consuming food inducing mutations produce offspring with randomly increased or decreased block counts. Although this temporarily lowers survival rates by causing the loss of evolutionary advantages gained so far, it creates the potential for new life forms unconstrained by existing frameworks.
Furthermore, controlling the amount of food allows you to intentionally skew the direction of evolution. Basically, you can create food shortages to foster environments where only highly resilient life survives, or conversely, provide abundant food supplies to create conditions for the emergence of diverse species, akin to the Cambrian explosion. Beyond food quantity, the player can also control meteor showers and commit other forms of minor mischief.
The lifeforms in ANLIFE learn movement in real-time through actual gameplay. This learning is controlled by the game’s unique algorithm, using AI technology, and enables all movement modes such as walking, crawling, swimming, and flying. The title has gained recognition for its unique concept and technology, earning a spot as a finalist in TGS2024’s “Sense of Wonder Night (SOWN),” which honors indie games with outstanding creativity.
ANLIFE: Motion-Learning Life Evolution is set to launch on February 12 for PC (Steam).
