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dkirschner's Botanicula (PC)
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| [July 18, 2013 09:02:22 PM]
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I read while playing that the people who made Machinarium made Botanicula. I had thought that Botanicula just aped the style, but reading that somehow gave the game more credibility.
Botanicula is a quirky little point-and-click adventure game. Instead of controlling a single character, you control a troupe of 5. There’s a little onion dude, a stick, a walnut, a mushroom, and a little flying bug thing. Sometimes you come across screens where each character interacts differently with objects. Sometimes these screens involve figuring out what to do with each character; other times they involve synchronizing the characters.
The game takes place on a tree (or trees). The tree is besieged by these evil black spider creatures that suck the light and life out of everything. Your crew sets off on a wacky adventure to solve the black spider problem. Although I figured that was the goal, the game doesn’t just tell you. Instead, you drift from screen to screen, occasionally solving a proper puzzle, but more often than not clicking on all the objects on screen and watching in sheer joy at the cute interactions that occur. The game seems to flow like a wandering mind. Yet, it’s a very guided wandering. Collect 3 children, then collect 14 chickens (??), then some blue eyeballs…Why? Just because. The joy of the game is in exploring and just clicking on everything in the environment, not really because you are trying to figure out what to do, but because you want to see what happens when you click on things, because it is often something unexpected, cute, funny.
I only got stuck a couple times, and played the last 1/3 of the game with a walkthrough just to finish. The art is fantastic, the sound design is adorable, the concept is realized, but not thoroughly fleshed out. For instance, the game ends rather abruptly without much fanfare and there’s no real sense of achievement at the end. I wish it were a bit longer, having took me perhaps 3-4 hours to complete. The whole cast of weird tree creatures is wonderful. I especially enjoyed the giant turtle and the moon. Google the character art for the game. I fell in love with it, and I’m not a person with much eye for aesthetics.
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dkirschner's Botanicula (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 27 June, 2013
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 17 July, 2013 |
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