Grow Home (PC)

Developer/Publisher: Reflections/Ubisoft
Release Date(s): Feb. 4, 2015
Genre(s): Adventure
Platform(s): Windows
Language(s): English
Pricing: $7.99 | £5.99 | €7,99
Rating: E (ESRB), 7 (PEGI), 0 (USK)

Carefully, you make your way sideways along a twisting beanstalk – there’s no more than a few feet between you and a red bud that makes your plant grow an offshoot, catapulting you into unforeseen heights. But then you click the wrong mouse button and you’re suddenly grasping at thin air and plummeting headlong down to earth. But it’s not all that bad – after all, climbing is the basic gameplay element of Grow Home, an open world adventure game from Ubisoft subsidiary Reflections, developers of the Driver series. Starting life as an in-house experiment with animation, Grow Home is now available as a full title on Steam, and is receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from players and critics alike. Read our review to see just what’s up with this unique title.

B.U.D., Seed Snatcher

Grow Home tells the story of B.U.D. (Botanical Utility Droid), a little robot who’s been sent to an alien world to find the Star Plant, whose seeds he is supposed to bring back to his home world. Launched from the mother ship, you land on a sandy beach, left to your own devices. Luckily, your surroundings are nice enough to lighten the load of your mission a bit. Looking around, dazzling rays of sunshine fall upon a sky-blue sea as you gaze upwards at floating islands and waterfalls high in the air. The view is so gorgeous that you’d almost rather just hang around and catch some sun, but this is no time to relax – there’s work to be done.

So you get B.U.D. moving, watching over him from a third-person perspective. As you explore the environment, you remain in constant contact with the mother ship’s computer. Known as M.O.M., it supplies you with all the information you need about this strange planet. Soon enough, you’re up against your first rock wall, and it’s time to start climbing. You climb by alternating back and forth between the left and right mouse buttons, each of which controls one of B.U.D.’s hands. The little robot is capable of latching on to any surface, no matter what it’s made of. Climbing is the heart and soul of Grow Home, and it’s a whole lot of fun, too. Though climbing even the tiniest spur of rock might take a little bit of getting used to at first, you’ll soon be clambering over everything like a monkey, combining your climbing skills with daring leaps from one handhold to the next. Once you get used to the controls for B.U.D., you get a glimpse of your objective right in front of you: the Star Plant.

Hitching a Ride on a Star Shoot

Your main objective consists of growing the Star Plant, which is quite small to begin with, to a height of 2000 meters. Growing out of the main stalk are a series of red buds called Star Shoots, which extend outward for a limited time when B.U.D. grabs on to them, and can be ridden and directed. When you direct a Star Shoot into one of Energy Rocks that float freely in the air above the island (and are recognizable by the green glowing bases), this causes the main stalk to grow along a certain path. If the first Star Shoot you try doesn’t quite reach the Energy Rock, it’s not the end of the world. The growth of a Star Shoot will result in the appearance of additional Shoots, which you can use to try again and eventually reach the Energy Rock.

When the Star Shoot connects with an Energy Rock, this sends a charge of energy into the main stalk that causes it to grow even bigger. Once you’ve connected enough Star Shoots with Energy Rocks, the main Star Plant will grow to the next-highest level. Since each player will grow the Star Plant in different ways, this ensures that each Star Plant and each playthrough of Grow Home will be unique. It’s entirely up to you to decide how you want to achieve your objective – whether that means seeking out the Energy Rocks as right away, or taking your time and activating as many Shoots as possible to create a spiraling monstrosity of a plant whose twisted path you can ride through the world like a roller coaster. Be aware, though, that activating Star Shoots could have a noticeable effect on your system’s performance, so if you have a weaker PC, you might want to hold back a bit when it comes to growing your Star Plant.

If you ever get tired of climbing, you can always use a leaf as a springboard, or even to glide through the air if it’s large enough, reaching the higher stalks in no time. But the plant world has even more opportunities in store for you. If you manage to get your hand on a “Fall Flower”, you can hold it over your head like an umbrella to sail through the air until all its petals fall off. Grow Home also has a total of 100 light-blue crystals hidden away in caves and under rocky outcroppings. If you collect enough of these, you can unlock extra gear for B.U.D. – 20 of them will get you access to a jetpack that is extremely useful for making progress in the game, and even allows you to take mad leaps from great heights, then break your fall right before you smash into the ground.

A View to Impress

The stylized graphics in Grow Home boast a colorful landscape with enormous visual depth, allowing you to see for what seems like miles all around. The higher up B.U.D. climbs, the more majestic the view of everything you’ve left below. When you look down and see how huge the Star Plant has grown under you influence, it really motivates you to keep going. The day/night cycle and an environment that varies as you climb higher, and the charming atmosphere is supported by relaxing game music and unobtrusive sound effects, all of which help to make the game just feel good.

The controls, on the other hand, are pretty much hit or miss. Controlling B.U.D. with the two mouse buttons is pretty intuitive once you get used to it, but when you’re not climbing, the controls can be a bit clunky. B.U.D.’s constant stumbling and bumbling about is pretty funny to watch (and adds to the little robot's child-like charm), but it can get kind of hard to control him sometimes. Simple walking along a narrow stalk can turn into a real challenge, and it’s not at all uncommon for B.U.D. to overshoot his goal even after you’ve already tried to stop him. And the controls aren’t the game’s only weakness – the camera is also a bit awkward. When you’re climbing, the camera can zoom in so close that it breaks through textures, but it has a hard time keeping up with B.U.D. when the tempo picks up, sometimes causing you to unintentionally walk of the edge of a platform and fall to the ground.

If you don’t have any special gear to break B.U.D.’s fall, he either crashes into the ground and shatters on impact or ends up sinking in the vast blue sea. You can also cause the little robot to self-destruct, sparing him the long descent to his doom. Since there aren’t any “lives” in the classis video game sense, dying doesn’t really have any effect on your progress. Red “Tele-Routers” are fairly distributed throughout the game to make sure you don’t have to start back from square one each time you fall. After a fall, B.U.D. is respawned at the most recently activated Tele-Router. Or, if you want to go back to areas you’ve already visited but didn’t explore thoroughly, you can always use the Tele-Routers to fast-travel back and forth between different locations.