The Regreening’s Steam Next Fest demo turns repairing a ruined world into a Baltic folk tale

Most games about the end of the world are about surviving it. The Regreening is about what comes after the running stops: a sun-bleached wasteland, a few stubborn sprouts and the slow, unglamorous work of putting an ecosystem back together. Positive Impact Games, a women-led studio in Hamburg making its first game, calls it a “soilpunk fairytale”, and the phrase earns its place. Where solarpunk dreams of gleaming green cities, this story starts at ground level, with dirt under the fingernails.

That premise is now playable. A demo of the cozy simulation is live on Steam as part of Steam Next Fest, published by Berlin’s ByteRockers’ Games, and it treats restoration as the system rather than the backdrop. You plant seeds, choose which animal habitats to bring back and learn which plants strengthen one another, so a patch of green only becomes a living biome when the pieces fit. Wildlife returns as the land recovers, which makes progress visible in the most literal way: the world fills back in around you.

A young gardener talks with Laima beside a restored greenhouse home in The Regreening — Image: Positive Impact Games / ByteRockers’ Games

The second loop is salvage. The deserted world is littered with abandoned junk, and the game asks you to clear it and upcycle it into decorations for your home or watering systems for your plants, a quiet argument that repair beats replacement. Then comes the folklore. The ancient nature spirits are inspired by Baltic myth, and they offer powerful abilities in exchange for your help, and perhaps a few shiny objects. One store screenshot introduces a character called Laima, which is also the name of the goddess of fate in Latvian and Lithuanian folklore.

What the studio has taken out matters as much as what it put in. There are no timers and no pressure; the pitch is a stress-free loop of gentle actions, wrapped in adaptive music and ASMR-like forest sounds. It is a deliberate counter-design to the deadline-driven farming sim, where a missed day can cost a harvest.

Restoring a bee habitat on cracked desert terrain in The Regreening — Image: Positive Impact Games / ByteRockers’ Games

The demo also shows how the game has been built. According to the release, the team ran a series of dedicated playtests with more than 7,300 participants, and that feedback shaped what makes restoring this world feel rewarding. The project has institutional backing too: in 2024, Gamecity Hamburg’s prototype funding programme awarded The Regreening €80,000.

Positive Impact Games was founded in 2024 by five games-industry veterans, a multicultural team that says it wants to make wholesome games that tackle contemporary issues. ByteRockers’ Games has been releasing indie titles since 2018 and presents itself as a home for small teams with fresh ideas.

The demo is available now on Steam for PC during October’s Steam Next Fest. The full game has no release date yet; its Steam page lists it as coming soon. For a genre that often treats nature as decoration, The Regreening makes the greening itself the story, one planted seed at a time.

Tags: Steam Next Fest, cozy games, game demos, ByteRockers' Games, Positive Impact Games, The Regreening