Wild Willows is a nature-restoration sim where the ecology is the actual game. You start with a tent, a campfire and stripped ground. Gather what has fallen, plant what belongs, dig out the water, and the preserve fills back in on its own terms. Herbivores need the right plants standing. Predators only settle once there is prey to feed them. Every one of the 150 animal species is real, researched from sources including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the National Park Service, US Fish & Wildlife, Audubon, the Smithsonian and the IUCN Red List.
There is no combat, no clock and no way to fail. Six biomes, Willow Meadow, Old Hollow Forest, Rushwater Wetland, Redstone Scrubland, Graywind Heights and Pelican Shore, each track their own Health and Balance, and restoring one opens the trail to the next.
Wild Willows: Built with Phaser 3.90 and React
Bailey shared some of the architecture behind Wild Willows, and it goes against a lot of conventional Phaser wisdom. The scene list is just one scene. No title scene, no menu scene, no UI scene. Every menu, panel, the journal, crafting, settings, and the tutorial are React DOM layered on top of the canvas. Phaser draws the world and nothing else.
"I expected to regret this and haven't. DOM gives me real text layout, real focus management, and accessibility, none of which I'd have enjoyed building in-canvas."
Perhaps the most striking decision: every sprite is drawn at boot with Phaser's Graphics API, with zero image assets in the entire game. Plants, animals, the player, habitat objects, all of it generated in code and rasterized to stay crisp under camera zoom and HiDPI displays.
Accessibility Features and a Free API for Developers
Wild Willows ships with an unusually deep accessibility settings screen: dark mode, high contrast, three colorblind modes, five interface fonts, four text sizes, reduce motion, simpler wording, fully rebindable keys and separate music and sound-effect volumes, all changeable mid-game with no restart.
For developers, Bailey also exposes a free public API at wildwillows.app/GameData, no key and no sign-up required. It serves all 150 species with their real diet, shelter, and habitat data, the same data the game itself runs on, alongside a ten-chapter browser lesson that teaches HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by building something with it.
Play the Free Demo
No download, no sign-in. Full game on the App Store and itch.io.