People have been making educational games ever since The Oregon Trail taught kids how to hunt, caulk wagons, and catch dysentery. However, many of these games were either not all that educational, or not all that fun. Older gamers may recall seeing Luigi try to teach them geography in Mario is Missing, or Rayman making math even harder in Rayman Junior.

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As video games grew, so did their capacity to teach. Brain Age made math fun on the Nintendo DS and Switch, and the Carmen Sandiego games are still handy for teaching kids about geography and history. What if players want to learn about science through gaming? Whether it’s astronomy, biology, and even chemistry, these are the best video games for learning science.

7 Car Mechanic Simulator 2021

Metascore: 70

• Developer: Red Dot Games.
• Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC.
• Release: August 2021.
• Genre: Simulation.

Science isn’t exclusively about dressing in PPE and staring at test tubes. Many scientific disciplines require getting one’s hands dirty, like engineering. Learning how physics works, how chemicals interact, etc., is key, but engineering lets people use that knowledge practically. Like knowing how to make machines that’ll produce something that uses forces, chemicals, and more to move or do other actions.

In other words, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 isn’t just for gearheads. Cars are pretty intricate machines, and this game helps teach its players how each of their parts work, what it takes to repair them, and how to fine-tune them to get the most out of them. It’s not exactly a mechanics course all rolled up into a game, but it’s a neat and detailed way to get started on the basics of engineering.

6 Infinifactory

Metacritic User Score: 9.0

While not quite as intricate as Car Mechanic Simulator, Infinifactory is a more accessible take on problem-solving and engineering. Players take the part of a human abducted by aliens and forced to create objects on an assembly line. They have to arrange a series of cubes in the right order to meet a quota. Once they meet that quota, they’ll go onto the next of 6 worlds to make even more complex objects.

It sounds simple, but it’s more involved than it seems. Players can travel each world freely to find extra objects that could help (or hinder) their quota or examine the assembly line itself if it has a fault, then fix it to get to the next puzzle. They can even challenge their friends by making their own puzzles for them to complete. It turns what sounds like a factory simulator into a more involved and intriguing game.

5 Portal

Metascore: 90

Both Portal and its sequel were everywhere during the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some may already remember all the memes about the cake being a lie, Cave Johnson going on about lemons, and that little space core fondly or with dread thanks to their overuse. Though that didn’t stop these games being neat little first-person puzzle platformers, which made players have to consider physics to meet its challenges.

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Some could be as simple as setting up a portal from A to B. Others required using them to build up enough momentum to get across wide gaps or move the lovable Companion Cube in just the right way. Portal 2’s gels, fanciful as they are, expand on this by adding friction (or the lack thereof) and bouncing surfaces into the player’s toolkit. At the time, and even now, it’s still an inventive series.

4 The Witness

Metascore: 87

Inspired by the classic 1990s game Myst, The Witness sees the player try to explore a mysterious island by solving puzzles. The more puzzles solved, the more the island opens up until players can reach its final goal. The puzzles are all based on grids, and the game doesn’t outright tell the player how they should be completed. They have to find the clues all around the island instead.

The puzzle’s methods aren’t usually tricky to figure out (separate the white squares from the black with one single line), but they can be hard to complete. All the player can do is come up with a possible solution based on the clues they find, put them into practice, and see what the results are. Or, in other words, they have to follow the scientific method from hypothesis to analysis. It's a minimalist way of encouraging scientific thought to progress.

3 Niche: A Genetics Survival Game

Steam Score: 9/10

• Developer: Stray Fawn Studios.
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux.
• Release: September 2017.
• Genre: Simulation.

Infinifactory and The Witness are fun problem-solvers, though their science is more general and abstract. Niche: A Genetics Survival Game delves much deeper into its topic, as it shows how creatures evolve and adapt to their environments. Players develop their animal, or "nicheling," by picking out its characteristics via their genes, then they get dropped off in one of 4 biomes.

From there, the player watches over them in-game day by in-game day as they explore their world and try to develop their tribe. It’s not as simple as it sounds, as each biome provides its own hazards, like different sicknesses and predators that can wipe the species out. But it also provides ways for them to survive and evolve to thrive better in their new environment, making them a neat microcosm of how evolutionary biology works.

2 Foldit

CommonSense Score: 3/5 Stars

• Developer: UW Center for Game Science, UW Department of Biochemistry.
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux.
• Release: May 2008.
• Genre: Puzzle game.

Foldit is interesting, as it’s not some PC or console game made by one developer or another to get the gray matter going. It was made by the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science and Department of Biochemistry as a part of their experimental research. Players have to use the game’s tools to fold proteins as perfectly as possible. The closest they get to their real native state, the more points they earn.

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In other words, Foldit gamifies protein structures, which are key in the fields of medical science, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. Since its 2008 release, it’s gained thousands of players who have unwittingly helped scientists with their research. For example, they figured out how to decipher a protease for a retrovirus that causes HIV/AIDS-like symptoms in macaques in 2011. As such, playing Foldit may help lead to more scientific breakthroughs.

1 Kerbal Space Program

Metascore: 88

Why tackle terrestrial science when players can give extra-terrestrial science a go? There are plenty of games set in space, from shooters to RPGs, though they don’t really replicate what moving through space is really like. That's where Kerbal Space Program comes in, as players help little aliens, called Kerbals, develop a space program on their planet Kerbin.

Through them, they can develop their own spacecraft, then make their own launchpad or runway to get them up into space. They have to use real techniques to form and maintain orbits as they explore space, rescue other astronauts, and set up space stations, among others. It’s even earned praise from real space organizations like NASA. Kerbal Space Program 2 entered Early Access last year, but until it’s more complete, space fans should seek out the original.

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