Accomplishes What It Sets Out to Do
This is a nice, fun little game that I beat to my satisfaction within 3 hours of playing. In it you are a little robot man who is sent to an alien (but relatively familiar-looking) world and tasked with making a giant plant grow high enough to reach your spaceship, which is located at 2,000m above sea level. In order to make the body of the plant grow, you must climb onto the sprouts budding from it and guide them into floating islands filled with energy juice. Along the way are 100 crystals to find, and you get a new ability at roughly every 20 crystals collected.
It's heavily physics-oriented. Every interaction with the environment, from climbing up walls to yanking crystals out of the ground is done by latching your hands onto things using the left and right triggers to control that respective hand. The robot moves realistically, which is to say clumsily. Moving on uneven surfaces can cause stumbling and steep slopes will cause him to tumble down. It sounds more frustrating than it actually is, since maneuvering is the primary challenge. To start out with you will mostly be climbing, which can be done on any surface. Eventually you get flowers which act as parachutes, leaves that act as hang-gliders, and a rocket pack for better mid-air control.
What makes it work is the amount of freedom you have within the game's space. The plant's sprouts can be extended far out in any direction the player chooses. As the robot gets higher into the atmosphere and landmasses become less frequent, the player is more or less entirely building their own level within the game's blueprints. This freedom also extends to the goals. The stated goal is, of course, to 'grow home' back to your spaceship. But searching for all 100 crystals has you broadening the scope of your exploration in a way that is possibly more interesting. Furthermore, any vegetable and animal you discover can be dragged back to a fast travel point and analyzed by your ship's computer and placed into a database. Some of those plants and animals can be tricky to find and trickier to bring back to a teleporter. I could definitely see some players getting more enjoyment out of filling that database than anything else.
I have a few complaints. The camera has two zoom levels, one of which is slightly too far away and the other is slightly too close. It's manageable but why settle for manageability when you can have a camera that's good? That and the climbing can sometimes be iffy in more extreme conditions. For example, climbing along the underside of a giant floating island. Just make sure to pay attention and make sure your left hand is definitely attached to a surface before letting go with your right hand.
The world's quite nice overall. Even though it is small, there are a few different biomes. There are secret caves dotted along here and there, and plenty of optional islands floating in the sky. In a lot of ways it's tonally reminiscent of 'walking simulators' such as Proteus, Dear Esther, and Journey. You know, go around a pretty world and 'ooh aah' at the pretty stuff you find-- none of which has much of an impact on your ability to walk around and go 'ooh ahh'. Where I think Grow Home gets one over on those is in its inclusion of goals and in the player's ability to impact the environment in a way that comes back around and impacts the player. Instead of simply presenting a world to explore and expecting you to do so in good faith it gives you several good, but not punishing reasons to exist in the world and exhaust its secrets. And I liked doing it! Grow Home does what it intends to do very well.
