Its been two weeks since a series of wildfires broke out across Los Angeles, with the largest of those fires having burned over 23,713 acres and damaged or destroyed over 7,000 homes and structures. The same week as the fires, The New York Times reported that not only was 2024 the warmest year on record, but that temperatures exceeded the global average prior to the Industrial Revolution.No matter how you look at it, its difficult to ignore the visible ramifications of climate change encroaching on our daily lives. Children of Saturn, a first-person found-footage game about a group of teenagers coming of age in an era of climate catastrophe, taps directly into this feeling, speaking to our current moment and urging for hope and action in the face of apparent hopelessness.Made by indie developers Boie Thomsen and Nils Schulze, Children of Saturn is centered on five teenagers growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Framed through the perspective of video camera recording, the story plays out through a nonchronological series of interactive vignettes following the characters as they loiter, explore, and ponder the precarity of their day-to-day lives.For Thomsen and Schulze, the origins behind the game date back as far as 2023, when the pair first linked up as partners for the Apocalypse game jam on Itch.io. As we started talking, getting to know each other, our shared values, we knew that this clicked and we just have to do something with meaning, Schulze said in an interview with Polygon. And so that sparked the idea, basically, and yeah, then we worked on it for the time frame of the jam and decided this project could be bigger. We wanted to do something more out of it than just get it out there.Over the course of the following year, the two worked on fleshing out the visuals and concept for Children of Saturn, drawing on their shared love of retrowave media inspired by the aesthetics of the late 90s and early aughts. Visually, we wanted to make it more personal to us and use the stuff we grew up with, Thomsen told Polygon. We are, story-wise, trying to justify it with the whole Y2K revival thing.Aside from the games PS1-era visuals and thematic focus, arguably the most striking aesthetic choice in Children of Saturn is the usage of real-life footage of wildfires filmed in and around Los Angeles over the past decade, each punctuating the games interactive vignettes with a timestamp corresponding to its place in the games larger story. Its actually, for us, the core of the game, says Thomsen. The timestamps that you see in the corner of the video are always, like, set at the day of those events in reality, even if it doesnt always make sense chronologically for the story. It was just more important for us to have this connection to the real events, so you always can kind of deduct from the date and the timestamp whats actually being shown.The trailer for Children of Saturn premiered during the EEK3 Indie Games Showcase on Jan. 10, just days after wildfires first began to break out across Southern California. We were a bit blindsided by this happening, obviously, and it is horrifying to see, but for us, the reality is that these are not isolated cases, Thomsen said. This is going to happen more and more in the future, especially now that climate change deniers are being voted into office all over the world. We decided to make the game about this specifically because this is so real. It would have felt weird to spend so much time making art and then not acknowledging the fact that the world is on fire.When asked what they would want audiences to take away from Children of Saturn, both Thomsen and Schulze were adamant about their desired response. I want people to be more angry and to hold on to this anger, because its not OK, says Thomsen. Whats happening right now, being robbed of your future, its just not OK.Children of Saturn is available to wishlist on Steam.