{"id":1103154,"date":"2026-01-27T13:24:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T13:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/?p=511344"},"modified":"2026-01-27T13:24:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T13:24:33","slug":"children-of-saturn-is-a-game-about-growing-up-under-the-shadow-of-climate-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/children-of-saturn-is-a-game-about-growing-up-under-the-shadow-of-climate-catastrophe\/","title":{"rendered":"Children of Saturn is a game about growing up under the shadow of climate catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s been two weeks since a series of wildfires broke out across Los Angeles, with the largest of those fires having burned over 23,713 acres and damaged or destroyed over 7,000 homes and structures. The same week as the fires, The New York Times reported that not only was 2024 the warmest year on record, but that temperatures exceeded the global average prior to the Industrial Revolution<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No matter how you look at it, it\u2019s difficult to ignore the visible ramifications of climate change encroaching on our daily lives. Children of Saturn<\/em>, a first-person found-footage game about a group of teenagers coming of age in an era of climate catastrophe, taps directly into this feeling, speaking to our current moment and urging for hope and action in the face of apparent hopelessness.<\/p>\n

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Made by indie developers Boie Thomsen and Nils Schulze, Children of Saturn<\/em> is centered on five teenagers growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Framed through the perspective of video camera recording, the story plays out through a nonchronological series of interactive vignettes following the characters as they loiter, explore, and ponder the precarity of their day-to-day lives.<\/p>\n

For Thomsen and Schulze, the origins behind the game date back as far as 2023, when the pair first linked up as partners for the Apocalypse game jam on Itch.io. \u201cAs we started talking, getting to know each other, our shared values, we knew that this clicked and we just have to do something with meaning,\u201d Schulze said in an interview with Polygon. \u201cAnd so that sparked the idea, basically, and yeah, then we worked on it for the time frame of the jam and decided this project could be bigger. We wanted to do something more out of it than just get it out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Over the course of the following year, the two worked on fleshing out the visuals and concept for Children of Saturn<\/em>, drawing on their shared love of retrowave media inspired by the aesthetics of the late \u201990s and early aughts. \u201cVisually, we wanted to make it more personal to us and use the stuff we grew up with,\u201d Thomsen told Polygon. \u201cWe are, story-wise, trying to justify it with the whole Y2K revival thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from the game\u2019s PS1-era visuals and thematic focus, arguably the most striking aesthetic choice in Children of Saturn<\/em> is the usage of real-life footage of wildfires filmed in and around Los Angeles over the past decade, each punctuating the game\u2019s interactive vignettes with a timestamp corresponding to its place in the game\u2019s larger story. \u201cIt\u2019s actually, for us, the core of the game,\u201d says Thomsen. \u201cThe timestamps that you see in the corner of the video are always, like, set at the day of those events in reality, even if it doesn\u2019t always make sense chronologically for the story. It was just more important for us to have this connection to the real events, so you always can kind of deduct from the date and the timestamp what\u2019s actually being shown.\u201d<\/p>\n

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