Too Long; Didn't Play: Grow Home

Sponsored By: My PS+ Account

Time Played: 90 minutes

Bud Review

Ubisoft takes a break from making games where you play some guy who kills a lot of people (and occasionally climbs a tower) to make a game where all of the people are already dead, so you just climb a tower.

No, it's not an original joke, but it's still a good one and it bears repeating.

Shoot Review

There was a time in my life where I didn't consider a game worth playing unless there were a lot of explosions in it, preferably caused by me. As time did its terrible dance and ravaged my reflexes and boyish good looks, I grew less attached to that sentiment. When I played Mirror's Edge I found myself wishing they hadn't bothered putting combat in the game at all. That opinion was only reinforced by the six hours I wasted on The Last Of Us before I finally realized I was only enjoying the traversal puzzles, which accounted for less than half of the game, and traded it in on something I actually enjoyed (or, at least, something my wife enjoyed, since that's how I bought her a 3DS).

The question I must ask – so that I may answer it and sound all prescient and stuff – is whether I meant it when I wished for less combat. The short answer is: apparently so. So here we have Grow Home, one of a sizable minority of Ubisoft games released in 2014 that actually worked, which has no combat and a lot of traversal.

Grow Home is the story of a Botanical Utility Droid, BUD for short, that is tasked with collecting seeds for his MOM. Given how hard they combed the thesaurus to get the name BUD, it's a wonder that nobody bothered coming up with anything for MOM to stand for. Let's just pretend it stands for Marsupial Orthopedic Magnetometer.

The challenge comes in because BUD, in quest of the rare star seed, leaps out of the Mothership with no means of getting back. BUD must, therefore, make a giant flower grow until he reaches the Mothership. He must grow, if you follow me, his way home. It's like a reverse Jack And The Beanstalk, but without the potential for people to pretend they're clever by trying Jack for megacide.

BUD's other challenge comes from the fact that this exotic and rare beanstalk is exotic and rare because it is, by plant standards, extraordinarily stupid. Any plant worth growing knows how to reach for nutrients. Sunflowers turn to face the sun. Maple trees dig deep with their roots to interfere with your sewer lines. Star Seed Trees, in the other hand, don't look for nutrients unless someone physically sticks their branches into fertilizer.

In practice, this means getting BUD to sit on a budding branch and make him ride it until it penetrates one of the floating green rocks that pepper the sky. The Star Tree will drain the glowing green energy from the floating rock, which will extend the trunk up into the sky, where it will sprout new buds for BUD to grab hold of and stick into new glowing rocks.

There's your premise. Robot needs to get back to its spaceship, and the only plant big enough to get there needs the robot to feed it. Some might call that awfully convenient. I prefer to use Terry Pratchett's term: Narrative Causality. Anything that needs to happen for the story to work will happen.

Grow Home is a remarkably spartan experience, and not just because it's possible to throw things down deep holes. You're presented with your objective – go climb a tree – and set loose in the world to do pursue it. There are also crystals to collect, because it is a video game after all, that give you perks if you collect enough of them.

I'm playing on the PS4, so all of my controller references will speak to that controller. The left and right shoulder buttons are mapped to the corresponding hands. Pressing a shoulder button makes BUD grab whatever the hand is nearest. That could be the ground, a tree trunk, or an unassuming sheep that was just out for a bite to eat.

When you're climbing, you grab with one hand while you reach forward with the other. There aren't any discrete hand-holds. Your robot hands will grip the dirt, rock or wood no matter where your hand ends up, so all you have to focus on is getting that free hand someplace advantageous. It sounds both easier and harder than it actually is. Everything is physics-based, including the walking, so managing BUD's momentum is of paramount importance, especially once you get up high. Falling all the way back to the ground is all too easy to do.

Fortunately, the landscape is littered with wifi checkpoints. BUD is apparently made of fiber optics because he can teleport through wifi connections to any wifi hotspot that's already been activated. You might wonder why, if BUD can travel via SMS, are you working so hard to grow and climb an organic ladder. Can't he just email himself home?

To which I answer: I'm sorry, I thought I already explained that this was a video game.

The inertia-heavy controls won't gel with everyone, but I have to give Ubisoft props for trying something new. So far I've found the controls to be refreshing, and the animations to be occasionally hilarious.

The thing to remember, however, is that Grow Home's primary gameplay mechanic is risk management. Sure, you could try jumping to the next handhold or using a leaf as a hang glider to zoom to the next branch, but you're as likely to wind up dropping a few hundred to a thousand feet as to actually land where you want. The safe way to play is to gradually plod your way up, hand over hand over hand.

Of course, when you do manage to stick that risky landing, the exhilaration is hard to beat, which is exactly why you do it again and end up falling, falling, falling to the ground. Grow Home constantly tests your patience, but in a good way.

Keep growing?

Grow Home is a prime example of the kind of game my kids love but would rather watch me play than play themselves. The translation of that apparent non-sequitur is that I'll not only be finishing this one, but will most likely play it long after the main objective has been met.

Sometimes that parental duty weighs on me a bit, like when the kids tell me to try not dying when I'm fighting a boss in one of the Donkey Kong Country games. With Grow Home, however, it feels more like a meeting of minds. We both see what we want to do, and my hands get to act out what their minds want to see but can't execute.

Of course, this isn't to say that the chorus of "No, don't fall, daddy" doesn't get old after a while.

Has it grown to be the Bloodborne of tower-ascent games?

This one is close to Bloodborne on the ever-changing scale. In no universe could this game be called easy. Simple, maybe, but never easy.

It's a straightforward game, it deserves a straightforward score. Eight out of ten dammits on the Bloodborne scale.

Comments

I also recently grabbed this on the PS4 and I absolutely love it. It's pretty much everything I want in an exploration game: a beautiful and interesting world, an extremely fun way of traversing that world, and no boring extraneous activities getting in the way just to prolong the game. Even the collect-a-thon of grabbing every single energy crystal was fun because moving through the world is fun.
Eventually your plant stretches through the atmosphere, and you can leap from space and fly through the entire world, and it's exhilarating in a way that few games ever achieve.

Thanks for the nice write-up!

I grabbed this when it was the PS+ game of the month and was so pleasantly surprised. It's light but engaging and I enjoyed every minute I spent with it.

Still mad Armello wasn't the game of last month - but I enjoyed the heck out of this write-up!

The best thing about this game is flying around with the leaf. The worst thing about it is when you lose your leaf....

I hadn't thought about playing this with my son, but maybe I'll try that later.

I already beat it though, so now I'm just finding all the other seeds.

Oh man, that first screenshot. It looks like BUD is going to do something awful to that animal (sheep?) with that giant carrot, and you can see from the terror in that thing's eyes that it knows it.