Grow Home

I was really expecting to like this game. I like inventive games and new ideas. It's got a great style and premise, and it tries some new things, but in reality it's not a great experience. That wasn't to say I didn't like some things about the game. What I did like was the art and the idea that the player has some agency in how the red flower shoots grow, changing the world somewhat in the process. What I didn't like were the poor controls the mundane world, and the lack of an interesting story. I played the PS4 version, and I was surprised to see many moments with frame rate issues, but it wasn't game-breaking.

The game is partially a collectathon (collect 100 crystals, scan various objects found in the game), and partially a skydiving game. I found the world to be pretty in a way that reminds me of Proteus or Darwinia, but the tiny vertical world becomes mundane and uninteresting after a couple hours. There just isn't that much to see, and what you do find is not interesting: familiar animals on an alien world, fruit, more fruit, mushrooms, and other plants. I collected everything I could during the first half of the game, but I realized by then I was not actually having fun doing it.

The game became a chore. The controls are infuriating, and the game expects the player to be nimble by the end. Controlling B.U.D. is a heavy-handed physics approach, where momentum isn't easy to handle. I learned to deal with most of it, but the running and climbing never felt anything but tedious and frustrating to me by the end. There is a button for self-destructing B.U.D. and I used it a lot by the end because I was falling often and I wasn't going to wait 2 minutes for B.U.D. to die. I found myself in many situations where I fell off a leaf or branch, and I recovered by landing on a lower branch, but it was easier to die than to go through the tedium of climbing back up.

There was no great payoff by the end, like a fun story reveal about who you work for (besides M.O.M.), just some text and credits. Maybe more is revealed as you complete your object collections after the main game is over, but I'm not interested enough to suffer through that process. I had a hard time wanting to finish this game, but I was overjoyed by the end only because my frustration and disappointment was finally over.