Bacteria: Life & Death

Bacteria: Life & Death gives you a dish with something alive in it. There is no score to chase and nothing chasing you — the whole game is moving a food source around, adjusting the temperature, and seeing what the colony does about it.

It stays interesting because the colony is genuinely fragile in both directions. Starve it and it thins out; feed it too well and it outgrows what the dish can support. Heat, cold and toxins each break it differently, and the stats panel down the right-hand side is what tells you which way things are going. Food you gather also earns evolution points, which the same panel keeps count of.

Every stage adds a complication rather than a difficulty — viruses, mutations, temperature swings, a chemical spill — so the thing you learned to manage last time becomes one of several happening at once.

The pace is deliberately slow, and that is the point: no rush, no clock running down, just a colony doing better or worse than it was a minute ago. It is a game to leave open in a tab.