Game

Growbot Review: a not-so-popular puzzle game

Robots in space. A classic, right? Add some flowers, music and puzzles, and you’ll have Growbot – a 2D point and click puzzle game where you play as Nara, a novice developer on her journey to save the world. The space station where Nara is completing her training is attacked by Crissy, the first planter who disappeared years ago and has now returned to wreak havoc on the crystal-themed destruction.

The first thing you’ll notice about Growbot is its striking hand-drawn artwork. The world is rooted in a biopunk aesthetic, wonderfully alive with a contrasting mix of vivid and sombre. A vine here, a crystal there, a multi-tiered waterfall elsewhere. The style is elegant and enhanced by lovely animations, like Nara’s waddling along the screen as she moves. Accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Jessica Fichot. Really fitting for the dark fantasy genre, the music is often eerie and ethereal. It’s sometimes more upbeat towards character themes, but almost always evokes an emotional response.

You’ll explore Growbot’s spaceship settings using a separate inventory – ‘storage’ to the left, ‘consumable’ to the right – and a cool colored cursor to navigate through its various compartments. These range from beautiful sites like gardens to more industrial sites like the engine room of a ship. They’ll all be divided into several sections, and more often you’ll encounter characters and puzzles near their respective entrances that require something to be found from deep within, such as an artifact. holds world-changing and useful throughout your journey or consumables to combine or attach to other things so you can progress. Thankfully, you’ll only need to revisit the zones once for a story-related event.

Growbot’s shimmering world looks great, but it doesn’t usually point you in the right direction.

It sounds simple, but Growbot often lets you down. For instance, it’s not particularly adept at telling you how to make progress if you’re stuck, and I often can’t find a little thing that’s evading me. For example, one keepsake you get is the Brainipilia, a rodent-like creature that lives for free inside Nara’s head to provide context or hint. Right-clicking on things with your own mouse is also supposed to guide you when you get stuck, but in practice, I don’t find either of them helpful. While Growbot’s glittering, shimmering world looks great, it’s often not enough to point you in the right direction.

It is much more useful to press the spacebar, it will quickly mark interactive objects with a red cross. Oddly enough, the game never told you about this keyboard hint, but it ended up being a lifesaver as I was desperately searching for a flower buried under a background that I thought only It looks very nice there.

Flowers are the foundation of the Growbot world, powering the ship’s defenses and the Growbots themselves. They play out notes that you can collect in your Flower Arranger, which is the root of the game’s most frequent puzzles. Clearly inspired by the ’90s hit Lucasarts Loom, Flower Arranger can create diamond-shaped keys to unlock shields thrown in Nara’s path. Each shield emits a sequence of five notes that you must duplicate in your Floral Arranger with the correct flower series. Again, this sounds simple enough, but to my hard of hearing many notes sound too similar to tell them apart. The suggestion system here is thoughtful and approachable, but it goes too far and makes the solutions trivial.


Small robot to arrange flowers in Growbot
The Flower Arranger

Aside from the Flower Arranger, the puzzles you encounter elsewhere are much more creative and varied. If you’ve played Machinarium or any of Amanita Design’s games, you know what to expect here. Like the Machinarium, you’ll read the signs and think critically here, which keeps Growbot feeling fresh. For example, in an underground water area, you must collect colorful jellyfish creatures by opening and closing a series of water doors in the correct sequence, while in the garden you must find three different ingredients to supply them. power a machine.

Growbot doesn’t require logical leaps like the Machinarium, but its ignorant suggestion system still makes even its simplest puzzles far more difficult than usual. There are times when I know I have to, for example, but don’t know how. You’ll like some puzzles more than others, but many have at least one downside, be it vague instructions or complicated controls. It’s nothing spectacular on its own, but combined it’s a bit tiring.

With games like this, I usually hope for a memorable story, but sadly, this is where Growbot let me down the most. Crissy’s abrupt return to the mansion sounds promising on paper, but there’s more world-building than actual plot here, and the repetitive dialogue seems insignificant to lead. to an unsatisfactory end. Growbot’s story is told much better through an opening cutscene, a guidebook, and a few brief flashbacks, and what a pity that ‘The End’ was brought to the screen, I wondered. : “Wait, is that so?”. Admittedly this is a short story, with the game only lasting a couple of hours, but I wish the story and the characters (not least Nara herself) had a little more time to breathe and develop.


A little ghost walks through a colorful forest in Growbot

And that’s what frustrates me the most about Growbot. It squanders much of its potential. When things click, Growbot can be magical, but for all those great moments, there are many other things that hold us back. If you’re good at puzzles and have a good ear, you’ll probably have a better time with Growbot than I do, but I doubt its suggestion system will annoy you just as much. I wish the game was as beautiful to play as it was to look at.

[Disclosure: Developer Lisa Evans’ former partner is Graham Smith, RPS’s former editor-in-chief. Graham still writes for RPS, and he provides the voice of Starbelly in Growbot.]

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