A new video game produced by the European branch of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's Geoscience Research Institute (GRI) aims to help young Seventh-day Adventist students navigate questions raised by secular education, leaders said.

Creation: The Game was presented by Noemí Durán, GRI director for the Inter-European Division, during the 2025 GAiN (Global Adventist Internet Network) Europe convention in Pravets, Bulgaria, on November 15.

Rationale and goals of the game

Creation: The Game is the first video game developed by GRI’s European branch, which regularly produces resources for local churches and members on faith-and-science topics. During the past few years, the office has been focusing on producing content for children and teenagers, and the new game is part of this renewed focus.

Durán reported that it was developed in a Minecraft style.

“We wanted it to be successful, so developers decided to adopt the same style,” she said. The primary target is 8- to 14-year-old children and teens. “This is for our children, for Seventh-day Adventist children,” she explained.

The project's goals are to provide a fun experience while meeting the needs of Adventist students studying in secular schools.

“They are taught evolution as a fact—they have all these doubts, they don’t know what to believe, and even if they stay in their beliefs, they don’t know how to react or how to respond to these teachings. We want to help them with that,” she said.

Durán shared that they also want to help young people with basic theology and paleontology content. According to her, we need to know science, we need to do science from a biblical Christian perspective, and we need our children to love science.

“Creation is not a fairy tale; it has so [much] scientific content in it. It’s orderly, it’s logical, it’s full of wisdom. We want to encourage our children to trust the Bible and to trust God,” Durán said.

Inside the game

"This is an adventure game," Durán explained. "It takes between two and three hours to complete, and is a story with a main character, a teenager named Luke. With his class they visit a paleontology museum to learn about evolution," she shared.

As players move through the museum, there are interactive activities to complete. “They have to read the panels and then answer some questions,” Durán explained. “It includes short texts, beautiful illustrations, and scientifically correct topics,” she shared.

For instance, players can find explanations about how fossils are formed or information on sedimentary rocks. "There’s also a dinosaur room where things move," she said.

“In each room, the players can go to a small computer that includes trivia games to answer questions about what they have learned in the panels,” she added.

When the students finish their visit to the museum and return home, Luke is left in a lot of confusion, according to Durán.

“He has many questions, so that night, before going to sleep, Luke prays to God for help,” she said. "Luke wants to understand whether everything is millions of years old and if we've evolved from primitive forms of life."

In search of answers

In the story, an angel visits Luke and takes him back in time to the biblical Creation Week. Through sounds, music, and imagery, players follow Luke as he explores each day of creation and discovers related scientific themes: the nature of light, the atmosphere and its components, photosynthesis, lunar phases and eclipses, the design of birds, and the creation of land animals.

The experience culminates in the creation of human beings and the first Sabbath. From there, the narrative briefly moves forward to address the entrance of sin, the Flood, and God’s plan of restoration. Luke learns that God has a “rescue plan” grounded in love, Durán said.

To continue exploring, Luke finds links in his room that lead to GRI articles rewritten for his age group, giving players access to additional resources. The story concludes with Luke returning to school and facing a test that presents both conventional evolutionary answers and creationist answers, encouraging players to think about how they might respond.

“There’s a beautiful ending, but I’m not going to spoil it for you,” Durán shared with a smile. “You’ll have to play to know what happens.”

Technical design of the game

After Durán’s presentation, developer Rauel Cremades outlined the technical side of the project. The team used about 50 different software tools to build the game, he said. The focus was on a system that would allow for easier delivery to all devices, such as websites, at a reduced cost, he explained.

"The design of the game is very complex," Cremades explained. “We have a lot of different parts, such as 3D with models, texts, audio, animation, mini games, and more than 100 scenes,” he shared. “I know it’s for kids, but it’s a big, very complex project, and it was hard to [make it happen].”

He noted that the integration of so many elements means that if one part of the whole system is broken, "nothing works,” making development and quality control especially demanding. A further stage involves preparing and submitting final builds to online stores, which he described as “another hard process.”

The game is expected to be available for Mac and Windows platforms through their respective app stores, he said.

Projects presentation coordinator Klaus Popa congratulated the team that put the game together.

“Thank you for your passion,” he told them. “I hope my kids can soon play it.”

The original article was published on the Adventist Review site.