Too Long; Didn't Play: Viridi

Sponsored By: It's free to play.

Time growing: 84 Minutes

Truculent Review

A desktop companion for people who theoretically like plants even though they keep murdering them. Sort of like Nintendogs for vegans.

Succulent Review

The very first thing I'm not going to do is get sucked into a discussion about whether this is a game. I'm sure even thinking the question makes me a horrible person and I promise that as soon as I'm done writing this I'll beat myself with chains and turn my hair-shirt inside out. Steam calls it a game. That's good enough for me, even if it does mean we only have one word to describe first-person shooters, agribusiness simulations and Japanese comic books about citrus drinks.

Viridi is a simulator of a pot of cacti, in slightly-abbreviated real time.

When you start Viridi, you are presented with a small, mostly empty pot with a snail crawling along the edge. Inside the pot are a handful of tiny buds that say "thirsty" when you click on them. Your only tool is a spray bottle, which you use to spray the tiny plants until they say "sated." Or, in my case, until they say "overwatered," because I clicked the mouse once too often.

The next thing you do is open up another game to play, because there's nothing else to do until the cacti have drunk the water you just sprayed. On day one, I fired up more Mortal Kombat Komplete. I already reviewed that in this space, but I did want to say that even after twenty years, Shao Kahn is still a bastard who is not fun to fight.

Where was I? Oh yes, watering. You can also spray the snail that crawls around the lip of your pot. When you do that, the snail's status updates from "Wow! Cute!" to "Wet."

Which reminds me. I really should fire Wet back up again. It's not half as bad as everyone said it was, you know. There's a lot of combat variety if you don't fall into the trap of pressing the same buttons to kill everything; sure, you can beat the game just doing a slow motion slide to headshot everyone, but why would you do that when you can also wall-run?

But you're not here to read about Eliza Dushku vehicles from defunct console generations. You want to hear about caring for a pot of digital succulents. After you've let the plants sit for a day, you'll see some growth in the pot. Unfortunately, those little shoots aren't cacti. They're weeds. Click on the little X icons to pull them. Then fire up another game, because the plants you want to grow haven't finished with the water you sprayed them with yesterday. Might I suggest One Finger Death Punch?

One Finger Death Punch is a Kung Fu game stripped down to two buttons. In this case, left and right. Waves of enemies will attack you from both sides. Your challenge is to hit the button corresponding to whichever side has someone in range to hit. If you swing at a side that doesn't have an enemy in it, you'll whiff the punch and be stunned for a second, allowing enemies to get in close and strike.

Some of the enemies are different colors, which means they have to be hit with accurate button sequences instead of single hits. Some take two hits (left, right), others want their marching orders (left, right, left). Whatever you encounter, you get a limited number of hits you can take before you lose the round. It's a great game to play when you've only got a few minutes to kill, sort of like Viridi, which is the game this review is about.

After a couple of days pass where I, frankly, forgot about the cacti, I boot Viridi up to see that my tiny buds are starting to grow. They're slightly taller than before, and starting to look like plants instead of buds. Now would be a good time to rearrange them in the pot using the "plant" tool. Pick each cactus up and put it down where you want it.

I don't know about you, but that weed pulling and succulent moving makes me hungry. You know who else is hungry? Pac-Man. And he's not just hungry for a better segue than the one I just wrote; he's hungry for combos.

They brought Pac-Man back in Pac-Man DX Championship Edition. Or was it Pac-Man Champion Edition DX? Championship Pac-Man DX Edition? I think there was a + in there somewhere, too. Whatever. Pac-Man is back and more addictive than ever, thanks to some new combo-chasing elements introduced as a sop to modernity. It's almost as good as the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, but it doesn't have that keen "bwaarp" sound that Pac-Man makes whenever he eats a pellet.

Speaking of which, did you know that Milton Bradley made a Pac-Man board game? You used a little mechanical Pac-Man to eat marbles. Sometimes you'd eat a yellow marble, which meant you could eat a ghost. The mechanic for controlling the ghosts was nifty; each player rolls 2 dice. You pick one of them and move your Pac-Man, and you use the other one to move a ghost of your choice. I used to have a copy, but I sold it in a garage sale. Fortunately, my wife had a copy in her mother's basement. It's missing three marbles, but it's still fun to play.

Did you know they call garage sales "tag sales" in Connecticut? In Massachusetts they call them "yard sales," and back in my hometown in upstate New York they call them garage sales. Regional colloquialisms are funny. Every state has its own word that means "large sandwich." Sometimes people fight on the internet about it.

You know what else people on the internet fight about? The definition of what a "game" is. A great example of a game that stretches that definition to the deform point is Viridi, a succulent-plant-maintenance simulator.

I'd tell you about it, but I just ran out of space.

Will I keep playing?

Was I playing before? I don't know, there's at least as much to do as in a game of Fallout Shelter, and I maxed out my vault in that. I can spare some mental clock cycles to spray pretend water on pretend cacti once every other day just to watch the things get bigger.

Is it the Bloodborne of Virtual Pot Stickers?

To the extent that remembering to load a game with no gameplay every day to maintain progress and not let your virtual plants dry out is hard, then Viridi is as hard as they come.

Otherwise, nope. There is barely any gameplay, so it couldn't very well be considered challenging. Of course, that's not exactly the point of something like Viridi, is it?

Comments

I don't know why but the constant references to other games while you were supposed to be playing this one made me chuckle.

Succulent.

That's just such a delicious word. Ssssssssucculent.

For some reason, now I want tequila.

Botswana wrote:

I don't know why but the constant references to other games while you were supposed to be playing this one made me chuckle.

This plus one. It's the game you play when you're playing other games!

I don't get the other game references. But yeah, I definitely sing to my cacti while playing other games. And the music is so soothing.