This is a lovely little game, with a neat little concept of Eco-consciousness.

Really enjoyed the demo, will probably get the full game eventually.

Let's clean up the world! Get rid of these oil spills! I want to live in a world where recovery of resources is the right course of action (and makes everything great).

However, while that's a nice sentiment and I whole-heartedly endorse it, that did give me pause when looking at the other mechanic in the game.

After having cleaned up some spills and pollution, my next step was to... get a bigger boat?

Now, there's some logic to getting a bigger reservoir and scoop, but it felt a little bit too much like I was, instead of an eco-warrior building a movement, quickly becoming part of the capitalist rat race! Bigger! More! Faster!

Why would I ever want a faster boat? It was just so relaxing to be put-put-puttering around, making the water slightly cleaner as I went.

I didn't want to upgrade my boat, I'd rather wanted to upgrade my environment!

The reality is that heroic clean-up is great as a symbol, but doesn't solve the problem, and the game mechanics perpetuate the idea that if only *we* would do our part, then pollution would be gone. Why?! We aren't the ones who put the oil there in the first place! We're fixing someone else's mess!

Unless we buy in needing an ever bigger, faster, stronger boat, *we* are not the problem. It's the capitalist-industrial system that puts extraction of value above everything else, and does not take negative externalities into account.

Sure, maybe somebody could give me a bigger scoop and bigger reservoir as I go, making my work easier, but what I really wanted to do was fund some allies:

To use this money to finance a non-profit lobbying group, or to be able to have a lawyer start a court case, suing the polluters on behalf of the river. Contributing to a project that that reintroduces species in an area and increased bio-diversity!

And never, ever, do I want to make my boat faster, and lose the sense of calm and chill while slowly, bit-by-bit, making my world a little bit better.