Biosphere 64

Biosphere 64 is a homebrew game by Flávio Zavan and Yasmin Imparato Maximo. It’s an adventure game set on a seemingly abandoned island, where you explore your surroundings, collect items, and combine them in clever ways to solve puzzles and uncover a path forward. It was released on 02 Feb 2026 for the 2025 64brew Game Jam.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password mixmatch, or on Drive. You can also get the source code here.

About Biosphere 64

This game feels like a throwback to those point-and-click adventure games on the PC in the 90’s. You know, like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road and more. They’re games that reward exploration and ingenuity when combining objects in order to progress in the game.

This game follows that same SCUMM formula with a few differences. Your movement mirrors early Resident Evil, complete with tank controls and shifting pre-rendered backdrops. It’s also much leaner: shorter in length, you never have more than 5 items or so at once, and the game is entirely free of dialogue.

Biosphere 64 has two main sections: an outdoor area and an indoor area. Each has their own set of items that you have to deal with my entering the pause menu and either equipping, combining or separating objects. Like many traditional adventure games, most puzzles hinge on equipping the correct item and interacting with the environment, but a couple rely on logic only rather than inventory.

Being a puzzle game, if you know where everything is, you can speedrun through the game fairly quickly. My first run took about 35 minutes to complete, but the second one (for the recording above) was just 10.

Credits

This game has one of the most detailed credit sequences ever, so I’ll exclude all the 3rd party assets they included.

• Flávio Zavan – Most things
• Yasmin Imparato Maximo – Puzzle design, beta testing, Music curation
• Arttu Patrik Jakonen – Beta testing

Review and Conclusion

I’ve always had a sort of love/hate relationship with this kind of adventure games where you have to manipulate items. It always feels like half of the puzzles make sense and the rest is trial and error. Which would be fine, but when you have potentially dozens of objects and hundreds of locations, the permutations can reach astronomical numbers quickly, and it’s especially bad if you have to backtrack a lot.

Biosphere 64 does away with a lot of that by keeping things simple. The object combinations are logical, I only really had trouble in figuring out what the pillow was used for, but that’s about it.

There aren’t any dialogue scenes which helps with keeping the simplicity up, but that’s also where a lot of these kinds of games get their charm from. It really makes this location feel like a deserted island.

Technically speaking, it’s very impressive. I originally thought these were just some random still backdrops, but they’re all one massive 3D file with a bunch of camera angles. There’s a python script that takes these files and converts them into the static backgrounds (both hi-res and lo-res), z-buffers and collision maps. It’s really ingenious, so I’d recommend that you look at the source code if you’re interested.

Unfortunately, that also means that the filesize is enormous. it clocks in at a chunky 38MB which is a lot for a game of this size.

A couple of other minor nitpicks is that there are some times where the z-buffer doesn’t quite work and you end up walking in front of a palm tree that is supposed to be above you. Also sometimes it’s hard to figure out where you can walk, especially in the second level; it took me forever to figure out that there was an area to the left of the juice machine and also the hallway that takes you to the keypad. The hit detection for interactions is also a bit hard to find, especially for the shoe in the tree and the cliff.

Don’t get me wrong, Biosphere 64 is still a fantastic game. Those issues are just tiny speed bumps in an otherwise smooth ride. Definitely give it a shot, and try playing without the video guide above. Trust me, it’s way more satisfying that way.