Nature and Life – Drunk on Nectar Early Access Preview

Have you ever wanted to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee? I’m talking literally here, not just being light on your feet with a good right hook. Have you wanted to experience what it’s like to be an insect in a micro universe? If you have, then Drunk on Nectar developed by Venugopalan Sreedharan is for you. Of course, if you’ve never thought like that, then… oh, what the hell. It’s still worth a look.

Drunk on Nectar is a sandbox game all about insects, plants and animals that lets you explore nature close up and personal. You can either play a god-like role and create the ecosystems or get down and dirty as an insect yourself trying to survive nature.

The aim of Drunk on Nectar is to offer a detailed and comprehensive nature experience for the player. The plants move, grow, pollinate and propagate as the seasons pass within the game. Each insect has its own style of gameplay, with the aim of making each different type of insect look and feel completely different.

Currently the release has four insects — jumping spider, viceroy butterfly, dragonfly and bee — along with three flowering plants — orange lily, greater knapweed, grass and fern. But other species are planned for the future, and you can even vote for a species you want to see included in the community forums.

Venugopalan was kind enough to let have a preview peak at the Steam Early Access release of Drunk on Nectar.

I chose to play a spider first. I figured they were probably the coolest of all the insects you get to play. The premise is, as you can imagine, to survive as an insect. So you have to hunt for your food and avoid predators, as well taking care of the important stuff like self-grooming (on a spider level of course).

First thing to note is that the micro universe is beautiful. At this stage you’re not overburdened with different plants and animals, but the ones you do have feel full of life, and they move and change as you make it through the seasons.

Or maybe I should say if you make it through the seasons.  It turns out that insects need to eat a lot, and I mean A LOT. 90% of what insects do is to fly or crawl around and try to stay well fed. This is certainly one the hardest parts of Drunk on Nectar, second only to the fairly complicated control system. Although insects are not complicated things, it’s just with so many keyboard commands to remember it can be a challenge. I certainly learned that with the spider, hunting is actually quite a difficult thing and moving around the 3d environment can take a little practice.

So, I switched to the bee and I found things a lot easier. Flying around the beautiful tiny world as a bee using my perception skills to find nectar was fun and kinda peaceful.

There is also the sandbox part of the game where you don’t play any of the insects but get to add the flora and fauna to one of several environments and see how they grow and react to each other.

So, as is the case with nearly everything I can think of, there is some really great, unique and beautiful things in Drunk on Nectar and some things that still need a bit of work, but that’s what Early Access and beta testing is for after all. I have high hopes that more and more will be added to the game over the course of its development, and the control system is looked at to smooth off its rough edges.