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dkirschner's Grow Home (PC)

[June 21, 2016 02:46:06 PM]

I think that Grow Home is really a game about rock climbing. Why? Because you climb rocks. And plants. And that's Grow Home boiled down to its essence. Sure, you're a cute robot named B.U.D. who has been dropped on this biodiverse planet to make this giant plant flower and bring back other plant samples to his space ship. But how do you do anything you need to do? Climb stuff.

It's a cool premise. There's a big stalk in the ground and you've got to make it grow 2000 meters into the sky. The stalk has little shoots sprouting off of it, and if you climb onto those shoots, you can make them grow. You ride the shoot (like a wild rocket ship), steering it into the sky toward rocks in the sky that pulse with green energy. Connect the shoot to the energy rock and the plant absorbs the energy and grows, opening access to new energy rocks and sprouting new shoots to ride to them.

You can just do this and skip everything else and probably beat the game in an hour, but there are a couple other optional things to do. One I did and one I didn't (mostly because I didn't realize it was a thing until near the end). There are energy crystals scattered around that B.U.D. can pick up. They fuel his jetpack and other processes so that mobility is a little easier. B.U.D. is notoriously difficult to control. He moves in an Octo-dad-ish floppy messy stumble. He'll sway left and right, fall over, flip headfirst, etc., etc. That's why you've got to climb. He's better at that. Right trigger (or bumper) moves his right hand and left trigger/bumper moves his left hand. Most of the game is like this: left trigger, right trigger, left trigger, right trigger ad infinitum as you are climbing and exploring looking for crystals and shoots. Anyway, I was trying to find all the crystals until I stumbled on one I KNEW was nearby but couldn't find. Then I abandoned my quest, but I found I think 85/100, which is a damn whole lot.

The other thing you can do is to collect samples of plant life. You grab them and bring them to teleporters and send them to your ship. Since I didn't do this, I have no idea what happens if you do or really what the point is beyond a story element. There are a couple other things to play with in the game, such as some fauna that you can toy around with (putting sheep in venus fly traps is fun), or just grabbing leaves and flower petals to glide around the pretty world.

The real cool thing is that you make that plant grow in a unique way. Probably no one else did it just like I did, so your plant really shapes your world, and it feels like YOUR world. It's cool once you get really high up to zoom the camera out and look down at how far you've come, at the plant twisting up through the sky, shoots sprouted in all directions. I definitely enjoyed the game overall, but the climbing and searching for crystals was getting tedious after a couple hours. Luckily it's not much longer than that, and at a cheap price point, it's worth a few bucks for a neat concept.