I think the idea of using the affordance of "area" from the tower defense genre in conveying a narrative about environmental ideas could be very intuitive and thematically appropriate. The ability to see the player's own impacts similarly is a good way of tying back to the main themes and providing feedback to the player to indicate progress. I am curious to see how the final game would expand on the cohesion between utilizing elements of gameplay in interesting and thoughtful ways to inform players of themes of "reconciliation ecology", which was also an interesting concept to integrate.