Playing Defenders of the Wild, a poem comes to mind: “Sailing to Byzantium,” William Butler Yeats’ lament of old age and concern over whether anything remains after this life. I considered recording a recitation to embed in this article, but you’d be better off hearing it from Dermot Crowley.

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It’s a rare game that saturates itself with a sense of loss. Defenders of the Wild is one such title. Both a lament for the natural wonders we so readily pave over and a defiant yawp in the face of automation and progress, there’s an optimistic romanticism to the whole thing.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. T.L. Simons previously designed Bloc by Bloc, another supernal game about staring down systemic oppression. Now he’s joined by Henry Audubon to take the fight to the fields. It’s not as great a jump as one might assume. Put them together and the combination produces a rallying cry: Bloc by Bloc for the urban populace, Defenders of the Wild for those who see their way of life being swallowed up by enclosures. The whole thing has the tone of a fable. A fable about slagging robots.

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