Become is a third-person adventure where you play one sperm out of millions

Become is a short single-player third-person adventure — the developer says two to three hours, linear — and the character you are steering is a sperm cell on its way through the human reproductive system. The verb list on the store page reads like a design document: explore, wiggle, hop, push, penetrate, and surf or fight currents. Read it twice and notice what is not in it. There is no ground to stand on, nothing to jump off, and no floor to fall to. Every metre you cover is produced by the body you are wiggling.

That makes the water the level designer. A current is not scenery here, it is the terrain feature you either ride or work against, and the difference between the two is a route decision rather than a difficulty slider. Around it sit hazards drawn from the actual biology: acidic baths, antibody attacks, immune cells hunting you, membranes that have to be broken rather than opened. It is a hostile environment where the obstacles are all soft, wet and moving, which is a rarer thing to build than another set of platforms.

The progression is collection. You gather sugars and proteins as you go and spend them on being faster, tougher and more efficient, so the cell you finish with is measurably not the one you started with. There are also buddies to rescue and then use to get past obstacles, and the stated goal is to become the leader of the pack rather than simply the quickest thing in the tube. You can customise how your sperm looks, which is exactly the kind of unserious detail that tells you the tone.

The subject matter is the hook and the developer knows it, but the game underneath is played straight. It wants you to learn the microcosm — where the acid is, what the immune system does, why a current runs the way it does — and it uses a body plan almost no game has asked you to operate to do it. The premise gets the click. The wiggling has to earn the second hour.

How Snake Pass became a platformer without jumping is the closest reference we have. That game wears the costume of a 3D platformer and then deletes the genre’s most familiar verb, and losing the jump is precisely what makes it new — locomotion stops being a solved problem and becomes the thing you are getting good at. Become is in the same position by accident of biology. If undulating through fluid has a technique to it, the whole game has a skill floor. If it collapses into holding a stick forward, the microcosm is a corridor with a very good skin on it.

How games use feedback loops is the one that decides whether the race stays a race. Collecting sugars to swim faster so you can collect more sugars is a textbook positive loop, and a positive loop in a contest settles the ending early — the leader keeps leading. The counterweight has to come from the hazards. Currents that push a strong swimmer off route, acid that punishes the greedy detour, immune cells that are more interested in the fastest thing in the room: those are the negative half, and without them the last hour is a victory lap you already earned in the first.

Ico, and design by subtraction applies to the buddies, and it is the part with the most room to go wrong. Ico endures because everything that did not serve the bond between two characters was cut away from it. Become rescues companions and then spends them on obstacles, which is a different relationship — closer to a key with a face on it. Rescuing something and then using it up can be the most memorable idea in the game or the most disposable, and which one it is gets decided by whether losing a buddy costs you anything you feel.

Become is made and self-published by [Valentin Wirth](https://valentin-wirth.de/become_game.html), coming soon on Windows, and listed under Action, Adventure, Casual and Indie. It is single-player, with Steam Achievements, stats, Steam Cloud, partial controller support and Family Sharing.

The length is stated up front and that is worth something. Two to three hours, linear, with a fixed ending everybody knows in advance — this is a game that has decided what it is instead of stapling a survival mode onto a premise that would not carry one. The risk is not that it is too short. It is that the swimming does not vary enough to fill even that.

If the appeal is being a very small creature at its real scale, with the biology taken seriously rather than played for a single gag, Project Ants is the other one on this list — a fallen ant warrior in a 3D insect kingdom, where the small body is the design rather than the punchline.