'Silkgrove': An Indian Solarpunk Video Game That Places Restoration At The Centre Of Play

Solarpunk is a genre that comes from a fairly simple frustration. For decades, most futures imagined in pop culture have been bleak — either broken beyond repair or controlled by machines, corporations, surveillance, and endless extraction. Solarpunk pushes back against that. It imagines worlds where people respond to ecological ruin by changing how they live, build, and share resources. Technology still exists, but it’s smaller, local, and designed to work with nature rather and not exploit it.

This is the philosophy that shapes Silkgrove, an upcoming open-world game that places restoration at the centre of play. The game is set after a war between humans and machines, but the conflict is already over when the player arrives so there's no fighting as one would expect. You play as Annie, a young Restorer who travels through different regions fixing broken infrastructure, maintaining tools, gathering resources, and slowly bringing systems back online. In addition to repair work, players can farm, craft tools, and manage resources in ways that prioritise long-term sustainability.

There’s farming, crafting, scavenging, and camp building, but none of it is framed around the threat and urgency of survival like most post-apocalyptic games. You move at your own pace, choosing whether to explore, repair, decorate your camp, or simply spend time in the landscape. The game allows room for just frolicking around — moments where progress isn’t measured by objectives completed, but by a growing familiarity with a place and the systems that support it.

Visually, Silkgrove feels calm and comforting. The environments are full of Ghibli-esque soft light, wide skies, and small settlements where windmills, water towers, and solar panels sit alongside gardens and overgrown paths. Old machines in this world are neither discarded nor destroyed — they’re just repaired, and reused. The balance between nature and technology becomes the spine of the game. Much of the its story is communicated through its environments — abandoned structures, working systems, and the traces of past lives filling in the history of the world.

The designer shaping this world is Chahat Bavanya, whose earlier work has specifically focused on solarpunk worldbuilding through illustration. His paintings often show futures built around everyday life — power systems you can see and understand because they work on simple mechanisms, homes that feel lived in, and communities that function through cooperation. The artist takes those ideas and turns them into a world we can interact with.

Silkgrove pushes back against the logic of capitalism itself — the idea that progress comes from constant replacement and consumption. It’s built around keeping things running, using what already exists, and understanding the cost of every system you rely on. Here, technology is just a tool and not an ambition driving most of the world right now. Encouraging slow living in a structural radical way, amd not just as a trend or aesthetic, the game is direct rejection of the kind of capital-driven thinking that has pushed both people and the planet to exhaustion.

The kickstarter for Silkgrove has ended and the game is set to launch soon. Follow it here for updates and add it to to your wishlist on Stream here.

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