A budding star amid the populous fields of puzzle-platformers.
Grow Home has a fairly basic objective: Grow the enormous star plant, ride its shoots into floating rocks filled with glowy green mineral sustenance the plant can absorb, and continue to climb the beanstalk to its ultimate destination above the clouds. The QWOP-like controls are both frustrating and endearing, presenting its metallic hero B.U.D. (short for Botanical Utility Droid) as some sort of unsteady but determined little trouper, whose frequent knocks and unfortunate explosions are warmly (if condescendingly) remarked upon by its caretaker AI "M.O.M.". Climbing entirely consists of putting one hand above the over in a regular rhythm, using BUD's clamps to gain purchase on any type of terrain, and much of the game is spent slowly ascending the central plant while a peaceful harmonious beat plays endlessly in the background, punctuated every so often by the tell-tale hum of one of the game's hundred crystal collectibles.
It'd be fair to leave at that, such is the simplicity of Grow Home. However, there's a lot going on under the hood of this deceptively simple game, and while it feels like a proof of concept tech demo to demonstrate a handful of innovations that could be carried over to a more elaborate video game, there's still plenty of content here to appreciate. Recall Treasure's PS2 game Stretch Panic/Freak Out: a brief "boss rush" style game built around a central grappling mechanic that ended up being a typically bizarre Treasure experience with a lot of merit despite its short runtime. Had such a game been made these days, when smaller prices and compact lengths are more the norm, I'd imagine it would've fared a lot better. Grow Home is that game: it was released in the right era to be appreciated for its brevity and for the handful of new ideas it explores just long enough to keep them from becoming stale or overly repetitive.
One of those innovations is the star plant itself, beholden as it is to the whims of procedural generation. One of those aspects of game design that has continued to engage and enchant the more mechanically-minded developers, procedural generation is as close to controlled chaos as a game is willing to allow. A game cannot be entirely dedicated to procedural generation, to this chaos, because so much of a game needs boundaries and clear cut definitions for it to function at all. In certain circumstances, however, like the layout of a dungeon or the potential growth of a character (or, indeed, a plant), the unpredictability of procedural generation has an immense beneficial effect to personalizing one's game experience (as, true to its chaotic nature, no two sessions will ever be the same) as well as extending a game's longevity - not to mention reducing a lot of memory space by incorporating a single algorithm instead of reams of level design data. However, the trick has always been to find where best to apply such a force, as too much chaos and randomness can make a game feel rudderless and/or bereft of craft. Fortunately, Grow Home's plant is one such worthy vessel of this capricious tool, continuing to expand ever upwards in wildly varying ways. Each new spurt of growth produces a number of leaves (which work as a useful springboard when the standard climbing feels too ponderous) and shoots (which are necessary to reach the island masses) in random positions along their branches, creating new wrinkles if those shoots happen to be underneath the vine or too far from the islands to reach in one go.
The game is entirely work. Whether you want to qualify that work as the menial labor this tiny robot must perform to achieve its mission, like a horticulturally-focused WALL-E, or the very real left-button/right-button carpal tunnel-inducing exertion required by the player whenever BUD must slowly climb up or around a rock or plant to reach their next target, the fact still remains that much of Grow Home is laborious. Sisyphean, sometimes. In spite of this, the game has such a gentle and peaceful aesthetic that this strenuous gameplay gives way to a Zen-like state of serenity. You work hard to maneuver yourself around a planetoid for a crystal, but the process doesn't ever seem that draining due to the calming visuals and audio. Maybe it's the ever-present (and rather discouraging) danger of falling off, or the vertiginous view as you get past the thousand vertical meters mark, but something about the climbing remains engaging, even if all you've done in the last ten minutes was to ascend to the next teleporter shortcut or moved about three shoots' worth of horizontal growth to reach a single floating rock. It's safe to say that, for as short as the game is, it feels as precisely as long as it needs to be. Or, perhaps, as long as it can get away with before it really does start to feel like a chore.
Like its focal flora, the game continues to expand beyond its original parameters. A few days after its release, the game received an update which added a secondary mission that nonetheless greatly expanded the challenge and longevity of the game without having to add a whole lot of new assets. The player could now locate the various plantlife and animals that littered the floating environs and then ascertain a means to drag them to the nearest teleporter where they could be scanned by the MOM computer and added to a biological database. This in itself presents a lot of smaller challenges, such as coercing the obstinate "meep" creatures to the nearest teleporter, or emancipating a particularly uncompromising pineapple-like fruit from its palm tree. These challenges are, like the core game, a mix of frustration and endearing moxie and worth it for the "King of All Cosmos"-style descriptions given to them by your mercurial master AI.
Grow Home has its problems, to the extent that its short runtime only works because if it were any longer the game would be almost unbearable. Despite this, there's a lot of satisfaction to be gleaned from the experience, and satisfaction isn't a particularly common positive feeling one derives from their games. It's an emotion reserved for those who choose to challenge themselves with high difficulty levels, or spend hours running around collecting Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects for a full set. While Grow Home isn't anywhere near as time-consuming or arduous as those examples, there's a lot to be said for looking down occasionally just to see how far you've come. In that regard, it comes highly recommended.
