Creatures Docking Station

(Creatures 3 not installed at the time of this review.)
Norn is hungry, so I tell her to eat. Norn refuses to eat. Norn suddenly dies. Floating-bug-thing says it was due to histamine, and lemons will cure it. The ironic part?
She died surrounded by lemons.

Wonky and wonderful.
Just the way I remember it.

⠀

Decades after its initial release, Docking Station (combined with Creatures 3) is still my favourite artificial life simulator. Do you want to be a loving parent to a tribe of cheeky critters? You can do that! Do you want to be a cruel overlord to a group of test subjects? Fire away! Do you want to be a gleeful scientist with a collection of haploid genetic curiosities? Dive right in!
The Creatures games are showing their age. Norns of the same breed and gender look identical unless they have a colour mutation. Smaller rooms don't take up the entire screen, leaving black space with nothing to fill it. Norn chatter is loud and constant, with no middle ground between having it enabled at full blast and completely muted. But if you're willing to look past these hangups, you'll be in for something truly special.
Norns, ettins and grendels have their own little neural systems, powered by the CAOS engine, that make them feel happy, tired, scared, hungry for a specific foodgroup, cold, angry, flirty, homesick, actually sick, overcrowded, and a boatload of other feelings. These chipper little fellows (and their kleptomaniac friends and their aggressive cousins) figure out how to speak, play, fight and more, provided that they are given the appropriate environment to learn. When a norn first learns about the concept of machinery, it'll try to parrot those around it and say "mama", before it gets around to a close approximation of the entire word, then finally mastering the word "machinery" itself. When left unattended, a grendel will grow up thinking that it is appropriate to hit norns, but if they are carefully raised from childhood, they can be taught to live harmoniously with their fluffy friends instead. As for ettins, I don't think anyone has ever managed to rehabilitate one from stealing everything under the artificial sun, but there's something charming about the little fellows. They aren't greedy, they just feel a natural compulsion to move things around and don't have a problem with anyone who wants to take things back.
This game still has a reasonable online community. Eemfoo's archive helped me relocate all the old mods that I used back in the day, as well as some agents that I'd never encountered before. As of this writing, the annual Creatures Community Spirit Festival is less than a week away, with the promise of new mods that dedicated fans have lovingly created. There's something special about the Creatures series that invokes feelings of curiosity, creativity and endearment in some people that is truly wonderful to see.
This game is free. There's no reason for you not to try it. The breed packs DLC is also free. There's no reason for you not to get that. Creatures 3, the game that Docking Station interacted with to create a larger world, is amazing value for its asking price and is perfect for anyone who wants to play with a larger world with significant hazards. If you want to go even bigger, I recommend checking out Eemfoo's archive and trying out a few metarooms. The Norngarden is a favourite of mine.
The Steam port of Creatures Docking Station is the best version of the game. Creatures Consortium have touched up the game, doing whatever they can within the framework of a decades-old game running on an engine unique to the franchise. They've done fantastic work and I would pay good money if they started producing DLC in the form of new metarooms, agents and breeds. The fact that they made the Creator Tools for the purpose of helping people make new mods proves that they truly understand what has kept the Creatures community going for so long and that they legitimately care about this project.
Play this game. You'll find norns that stand out from the crowd, critters that manage to do something interesting, whether by their own actions or because of a genetic anomaly that'll make you sit up and take notice. Maybe you'll start a wolfling run and leave your computer on for six hours so that you can come back to something unusual that might not have come about had you intervened. Perhaps you'll meticulously care for a small group, hoping to cultivate that red colouration that cropped up in a chi chi norn and somehow crossbreed it into your treehugger norns. You could attempt to crossbreed toxic norns, with their bizarre genome, with a bengal norn in the hope of creating stable offspring. Or you could go wild and release several dozen norns all at once, filling every room with critters who can't get any sleep because the neighbours won't stop talking about the overwhelming need to consume starch.

A weird and quirky little pet game that oozes bizarre alien charm from every pore. You can play it like just a cute pet game or mess with genetics like a mad scientist.
Much older game so the controls and ui elements might take a hot minute to adjust to, and some features like the online pet sharing is I think straight up busted, but otherwise its just... its just weird and bizarre in a charming and endearing kind of way

One of the most fascinating experiments in artificial genetics, intelligence, and brain simulation disguised as an unassuming fishtank-like experience. What feels shallow and random on the surface eventually gives way to absurd depth and complexity that no other game of its type has dared even approach - even two decades on from release - the more you play, learn and understand what makes the game's titular Creatures tick.
If you're looking for an active experience, you can cherry pick Norns in mad genetic experiments to create your own breeds or cradle every single child into a strong, knowledgeable individual that can survive any obstacle you throw at them.
If you're looking for a passive experience, you can set up a sandbox and let it run - to see how long your Creatures can survive without your assistance, or see what comes out the other end as the complex simulation slowly mutates and evolves them into something startling and unexpected.
While it might not be much of a game at the end of the day, with no clear goals and objectives, for those looking for a fascinating, nearly scientific simulation of virtual life there's nothing else that even comes close to this game.
They really, really don't make them like this anymore, and that's a crying shame.

I had a norn named filbo who got all her bones removed and lived