Climate change is a critical global challenge that requires innovative educational tools to promote awareness and engagement. This paper examines the potential of serious games as an interactive media tool for climate change engagement, offering a framework and recommendations for future serious game design in this context. To validate the framework, we developed a serious game concept and prototype EcoLand using the proposed recommendations. EcoLand was created utilizing a user-centered design approach, which integrated gamification techniques and user experience principles to enhance engagement and educational impact. The research process follows the design science research process and includes literature review, game review, conceptual framework development, prototype creation, and user testing through structured tasks and a questionnaire. Our findings suggest that user-centered serious games can effectively simulate real-world climate challenges, enhance experiential learning, and support sustainable thinking and action. This study highlights the value of involving users in the design process to improve both user engagement and communication effectiveness. This paper contributes with both a theoretical design framework and recommendations for designing serious games that make climate change more relatable and actionable for diverse users, as well as empirical findings.