Ambient creatures

Creatures theme

Includes creatures of some sort that live about on the environment without much impacting on gameplay, often having absolutely no meaningful interactions to do with.

98
games
20
platforms

Alternate name: Ambient life

Often these have absolutely no interactions with the player, may scurry away from the player, or in some cases allow the player to kill them for no reason. Generally these only exist in trying to make the world seem less sterile and devoid of life. A guarantee these have over the wildlife tag is that they will NEVER attack the player character no matter what (they immediately cross over to wildlife or to being actual enemies).

Commonly small animals like rodents (rats) and small birds (ravens) and other such unobstructive things, including variety of larger (but not gigantic) insects such as roaches.

Killing or otherwise dealing with ambient creatures gives no rewards (no experience, no loot, nothing), and usually no detriments besides announcing your location via your own gunfire or such, except in case of it being a secret.
See also: wildlife

The first Ambient creatures video game was released in 1984.

Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard and Valve published most of these games.

Platforms

Windows 39
Linux 19
Mac OS Classic 9
Mac OS X 7
MS-DOS 4
PS3 3
X360 3
Apple II E 2
Pandora 1
C64 1
Tandy Coco 1
N64 1
PS2 1
Internet Only 1
Android 1
PS 1
BSD 1
Saturn 1
PS4 1
Switch 1

By year

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