About the specimen

The idea was to compress evolution into an afternoon and hand the wheel to someone with no qualifications. You feed a creature. It mutates. You choose from a short menu that begins with “grow a mouth” and ends somewhere near “an old god that has noticed you.”

Most idle games ask you to watch a number climb. This one keeps interrupting to ask what the number should become next. Fourteen of those decisions wait along the full mutation tree.

The creature is recomposed from your answers. Early choices can alter its body plan; later ones change its anatomy, posture, material, face and movement without erasing where it came from. A winged lineage and a fungal colony no longer wear the same silhouette with different decorations.

When a specimen dies, it leaves a tombstone and genome for permanent traits. Selected creatures can be preserved in the Forbidden Garden as exact records of what you made.

Twelve secret combinations are buried in the mutation tree. The game will not tell you what they are.

Everything is written as though a very calm laboratory is filing routine paperwork about an escalating catastrophe. The organs include a Standing Committee, so metabolism now requires a quorum. The corporation mutation is legally a person and biologically unclear. Nothing winks at the camera.

The playable game is one HTML file. It uses no game engine, account system or advertising. It works offline once loaded. Saves remain in your browser and can be exported as a code. Identifier-free event counts can be disabled in Records.

It was made by Kieran Simpson as an independent browser game. Read the technical record for the decisions and failures behind it.