Grow Home, a game by developers for developers. No really, it was designed by Ubisoft people for their own developers to unwind with. When I worked in the industry we just had a back door code for all downloadable content, not an entirely other team developing our own personal games for us. I like the idea though, give them a chance to do something simple for the other employees to enjoy. Grow Home isn’t that bad either; it is just really simple in concept and fairly simple to play. The premise of the game is that you are a robot tasked to grow a really big plant and collect the seeds once you reach orbit. The plant can branch off in order to connect with certain rocks and grow bigger in order to reach other certain rocks.
It can be deceptively hard in some cases. It plays a lot like QWOP but you just control the hands in this case but sometimes the controls don’t work that well either way. Maybe I was doing it wrong but I could never seem to get B.U.D. to climb underneath things. He would just get hung up on something and then eventually plummet to his doom. I was also a little disappointed in the items that could be collected. The game made it sound as though I could collect and catalogue all sorts of things; not just a couple of plants. The main problem with this game is that it is very slow.
When you start growing things it becomes a lot more interesting and it is exciting to watch the plant grow so large. There are also some interesting explorations sections in some of the larger rocks. I remember finding an unground cave in one of the rocks and enjoyed climbing around it collecting things for a while. The majority of the game is just spent trying to climb from one place to the next with very little in-between except trying not to fall asleep and fall off so you have to start over again. It became so easy to get distracted after my plant was tall enough the slightest thing began to pull me away and eventually I would just fall back down again.
It looks alright as well, a kind of old school style where you can practically count the individual polygons used to make an object. B.U.D. reminds me of Wall-E; the simple robot doing a never ending and tedious job and only speaks in fax machine. I eventually reached the top but it was more out of a desire to see the end; which isn’t a good sign in a game this short. In the long run though it is an alright game and if you have a long enough attention span maybe even worth a few bucks.
