Life Below Dev On Aiming For A City Builder That Does Not Destroy Nature
The project replaces the genre's usual expansion-by-clearing with research and species variety as the gating currency, and its director says humans appear nowhere in the game at all.
Key Facts
- Life Below launched on PC via Steam on May 26, 2026, published by Kasedo Games and developed by the Norwegian studio Megapop.
- Development of Life Below involved 12 in-house staff and 15 people including external contractors for story and music, and took three and a half years.
- Players control Thalassa, a novice guardian, and instruct water fairies to build coral structures using two early resources, coral matter and pearls.
- Energy in Life Below comes from moon coral and reaches only a fixed distance, with anything built outside that range nonfunctional.
- Megapop conducted an interview with game director and project manager Lise Hagen Lie at its booth at Tokyo Game Show 2026.
Reporting from 2 sources: Inside, Game Spark.
Megapop, the Oslo studio behind the coral reef management game Life Below, showed the title at Tokyo Game Show 2026 and gave a booth interview about its design. The game launched on PC via Steam on May 26, 2026, with Kasedo Games as publisher. Players act as Thalassa, a novice guardian in the form of a sea angel, who directs water fairies to build coral on rocky terrain and expand an ecosystem. Construction runs on two resources, coral matter and pearls, and power comes from moon coral that must sit within reach of other moon coral. Biodiversity gathered from resident marine life unlocks research and access to new zones, including fjords and submarine volcanoes, each with its own water temperature and pH level. Story events include heat waves and acidification that stress coral, answered with heat coral, cool coral, and alkali coral. Director and project manager Lise Hagen Lie said the team consulted marine biologists while keeping the genre's core loops intact.
- Megapop is based in Oslo and has been running for 14 years, starting with mobile games before moving to Steam and home consoles six years ago with what director Lise Hagen Lie called "earth-friendly city-building simulations."
- The project took three and a half years, with 12 in-house developers and 15 people total counting outside help for story and music.
- Lie cited Frostpunk as the biggest influence, along with The Wandering Village, IXION and Terra Nil, and said the base-building and expansion in StarCraft inspired her most.
- Her reasoning for the theme: she grew up by the sea, her grandfather built boats, and Norway has the world's largest cold-water coral reef, which she wanted more people to know about.
- Coral can only be built on rocky ground because reefs need rock to grow, a rule the team worked out after talking with marine biologists.
- Lie said "humans do not appear at all" in the game, part of keeping its systems centered on nature.
- Multiple difficulty levels were added to balance strategic feedback against the calm of looking over a world like a garden.
- Japanese support was planned from the first year of development; after translators said the font was hard to read, Lie picked a new one herself.
- She does not want players to look anything up, saying "I didn't want to make an educational game," and would rather deliver "the surprise and curiosity of 'There is such a world.'"
- Her favorite sea creature is the coral crab; orcas are absent from the game but might be added later.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.