SimCell: the Strange Loop Games nanobot game about cell biology

The player controls a nanobot sent into a human cell to repair and protect it from inside, using the cell's own organelles. A virus invasion drives the mission. The systems in the game are built to reflect real scientific information about the cell, and the player has to investigate and understand them to finish the job.

Scanning is the central action. Every object in the cell, large or small, can be scanned, and each scan explains how that object works. Learning the game's controls and learning cell biology turn out to be the same activity. A scan alone does not finish a mission, though. The player has to fit the separate explanations into one picture of how the cell works, and in doing so rebuilds the processes a cell uses to stay alive.

The designers describe this as a context in which players control their own learning: information is pulled, then combined, and the answers belong to the player because the player went looking for them.

Strange Loop Games, an independent startup in Seattle, made SimCell as one of a suite of educational games for tablets covering subjects such as biology and math. John Krajewski is named as its president. Before founding the studio he was lead AI programmer at Electronic Arts Australia, and his credits include Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Suffering and Destroy All Humans.

The studio's stated goal is to put the power of current game hardware into gameplay and not only into graphics. Its engine is custom built and specializes in physics and fluid simulation.

Krajewski's stated approach is deep, interactive simulation, with gameplay that would not have been possible on hardware five or ten years earlier.

The studio's website, last read in November 2026, centers on Eco, a game in which a community builds a civilization able to stop a meteor without destroying its ecosystem. SimCell does not appear on it. The old education address on that site now opens the same home page as any other address, and no current page for SimCell from Strange Loop Games could be found.

Because no official page offers the game, it is listed here as unconfirmed.

The site's news section currently covers updates to Eco, including a road map to its Update 10.