Explore Your Inner Geologist in This Free Game

If you're a kid with an interest in the natural world, gravel can be amazing stuff. It's everywhere for one thing, and depending on your local geology it can be full of surprises. I grew up in an area that experienced a fair bit of glacial till during the last ice age which means (among other things) that we had some really interesting gravel.

When my family went camping I had a habit of crouching near the end of our little lot in the campground and picking through it as my parents set everything up. Every now and then one piece or another would catch my eye and make it into my pocket. One piece might have a bit of sparkle from the sediment locked inside, another might be distinctly striped from layers and layers of material compressed together over time.

Then there was the fossil I found; the simple recess of a shell in an otherwise uninteresting bit of grey, no bigger than the tip of my little finger. Totally run of the mill for the area in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless that particular find made my day.

I got a similar feeling when I made my first discovery in League of Lonely Geologists, a pay-what-you-want game by TAKORII. It had taken me a moment to make sense of what exactly was going on, and what I was meant to do. I had panned around the section of earth I was given, fiddled curiously with the Stargate-like portal and the various tools and baubles laid out on the mat where I started. I'd flipped through page after page of the cataloguing book, looking at snapshots of rocks found by others, reading the names and descriptions they'd assigned. There were samples of all shapes, sizes and colors. Some were written sentimentally, others scientifically, and a few were paired with simple quotes that their discoverer had deemed fitting.

Eventually I started looking for my own discoveries in earnest and came upon a little pile of dirt distinct from the flattened soil all around it. I dug, and was rewarded with a mottled and polychromatic stone, streaked with color that gleamed and shifted almost impossibly in the light. I catalogued it and brought it back to the mat for safe keeping.

League of Lonely Geologists saves your collection between sessions and shares your catalog entries with other players, which makes it worth returning to even after you've made your first few discoveries.

Another stone I found was somewhat less impressive, so I brought it up to the little portal instead. It showed me a place with red-tinted earth, and when I tossed it through the portal, another rock emerged, smooth and black and slightly speckled. I looked it up in the catalog and read my colleague's description.

Download League of Lonely Geologists for Windows free (or pay what you want) on itch.io.