Solarium: the free plant science adventure game from Sunfleck
Solarium is a free adventure game in which a botanist-in-training answers plant science questions in a sci-fi setting. Its maker, Sunfleck, still lists it, and it can be downloaded for Windows.
Updated
What Solarium is and who made it
Sunfleck is an independent game studio formed by three people. David Ehret, a plant scientist with a doctorate, brings the research background and a passion for building games in the Unity3D engine. Nathan Ehret is the artist and gamer. Don Ehret is the musician and composer.
Solarium was their first game. It sets out to raise awareness of how much the world depends on plant science, a field that touches the future of global agriculture, the ability of plants to adapt to a changing climate, the health of ecosystems and the management of a sustainable biosphere.
The story takes place in a distant future. A race of aliens, working with earthlings, explores galaxies and documents every form of life in case their home worlds are destroyed. This is the Solarium Initiative. DNA from each environment goes to a botanical study center, where each environment is rebuilt as a separate module. The desert and alpine modules are two of them.
How the game plays
You play a botanist-in-training. Before an actual expedition, you visit each module to learn about its plants. Each module poses theme-based questions, and a correct answer earns points. Facts about plants come out along the way, and hints for the harder questions have to be found in the module.
Enough points unlock plant components. At the PlantGen Station you combine them into custom plants of your own design.
A mini-game adds a second kind of task: matching the common parts of a plant to their botanical structure.
What is true today
Sunfleck's website is online in November 2026. It presents the studio's work as stories infused with science, woven into film and interactive media, and lists Solarium as a video game with a link to its Steam page. The same page lists smartPLANT, another video game, and two animated films.
Steam shows Solarium as free, released on July 27, 2017, with the developer named as Sunfleck Software. The listing names Windows as the only platform.
Players who want to try it therefore start from the Steam page linked on the studio's site.
Questions about Solarium
Is Solarium free?
Yes. Steam lists it as free, and the studio's site presents it with a link to that page.
Which systems can run Solarium?
Steam names Windows as the platform. A Mac version was offered in 2015, but no current Mac download was found.
What does Solarium teach?
Plant science: facts about plants from quiz-style questions in themed modules, plant structure through a mini-game, and the idea of designing custom plants from collected components.
Who is behind Solarium?
Sunfleck, an indie game studio formed by David Ehret, Nathan Ehret and Don Ehret.