Grow Home

This is yet another in the long list of games that reinforces the idea that a short, streamlined game that ensures it has little to no filler content and knows exactly what it wants to be is a far more satisfying experience than something that tries cramming endless amounts of content into something with reckless abandon. Grow Home is a game that took me by complete surprise in a few ways, one of the biggest being that a game with such charm and small scale and focus came from a small team at Ubisoft of all people, but also just because this is so elegantly designed in so many regards that I can’t help but go “wow”. Grow Home is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and bases all aspects of it around this central concept to craft a remarkably streamlined experience that makes full use of its low number of mechanics to make each element feel deliberately and cleverly incorporated.

Whether it’s climbing, using the jetpack, teleport points and even the ability to zoom out the camera, every element of Grow Home feeds into this core idea of exploration, and does so in a way that makes the relatively small island environments feel absolutely massive thanks to how many intricacies can be found thanks to what the player is able to do. Climbing in this game is intuitive and mostly simple to pull off, which adds another dimension of exploration to things, knowing that anything you see, you can climb up and find more collectibles. This makes something that usually would feel like just another piece of decoration, such as a huge mountain, end up just feeling like yet another area to have fun with and explore. Along with allowing optional content to be more cleverly implemented, the way this ties into the core gameplay is excellent, allowing the player to both feel relatively safe while scaling the giant plants thanks to how cooperative this climbing tends to be, while also being balanced both by the player’s ability to stop forward momentum or briefly increase their height with their jetpack, giving them a lot of mobility and control in the air to almost never feel as if the game is fighting against the player. The approach to level design feels akin to that of the first Spyro the Dragon game in an admirable sort of way, feeling almost like a collectathon where the player gets to explore small, self-contained areas, often with very little threat to the player, the challenge instead stemming from the task of discovering all the clever little secrets each map contains.

This contributes to the game’s relaxing, comfortable feel, which is reinforced by the fact that there’s only one thing in the entire game that will actively attempt to destroy you, and failure still nets words of encouragement that urge you to continue and keep saying that they believe in you. Nothing in this game aims to knock you down a peg at all, as that’s just not the sort of game this is, it’s the kind that makes it clear that it just wants you to succeed and have a good time while doing it, and I respect that a lot, especially when everything is executed so nicely. That said, I do feel like it’s a good thing this game only takes a couple of hours to beat, as the gameplay loop does begin to get a bit stale by the end, with only so much time being able ot be dedicated to climbing up this gigantic central plant and making its branches extend to other tiny floating rocks before it gets a bit repetitive. The game undoubtedly shines whenever it presents a new larger island to the player, so those moments that are just spent growing to reach that next island can definitely feel a bit sparse, especially by the end when you have to do it so many times. Even with this it’s not too big an issue simply because the game’s over before it can get really frustrating, but I still did feel as if things hit a point where I was just doing it in order to get to the next part of really interesting content, rather than for the intrinsic enjoyment of the task I was performing. That said, this plant growing aspect of the game also ties nicely into the world design as a whole and the focus on verticality it has certainly separates it from a lot of other games of a similar style to this, and provides an amazing sense of spectacle once you go really high up and then deploy a glider and can see just how far you’ve managed to climb up.

While Grow Home certainly has its flaws and quirks that stop it from being an outright masterpiece, it’s nonetheless a fantastic little game that demonstrates how effective a streamlined and focused design approach is. This game succeeds so well because every aspect of it contributes to its central ideas and mechanics, there’s no content here just for the sake of it, it’s just a short game that knows what it wants to be, does what it needs to so it can accomplish its goals, and then it ends before It gets tiresome. I highly recommend Grow Home, one of the most relaxing and comfy games I’ve played in quite a while , and it all fits neatly together in this cohesive package.

Grow Home is a game i would sum up as a mix between the mechanics of Octodad and the artsy visuals of Proteus. I was really impressed at the scope of the game and the huge verticality of the map. Apart from that though the game doesnt offer much. its an open world collectathon, which should be expected coming from Ubisoft. Its just okay, i felt like i wasted time by playing it. Since the controls are cumbersome, falling down is not all that infrequent, which can make the repetition of the game even worst.

Not a good game in my eyes