Grow Home is a 3D platforming game which centers around being a small robot who slowly climbs up a vine, guiding its growth into crystals to allow it to grow yet higher, so he can get back to his space ship and go home. With extremely loose controls, a dodgy camera, tedious mechanics, and no depth, this is a game to avoid, feeling more like a school project than a finished game.
StoryGrow Home is a 3D platforming game which centers around being a small robot who slowly climbs up a vine, guiding its growth into crystals to allow it to grow yet higher, so he can get back to his space ship and go home. With extremely loose controls, a dodgy camera, tedious mechanics, and no depth, this is a game to avoid, feeling more like a school project than a finished game.
Story
There is very little story to the game; there are a few bits of flavor text here and there, and MOM – either an AI of some sort, or a fellow being who is elsewhere in the universe – occasionally gives you hints or makes “wry” (non-voice acted) remarks on your progress.
Gameplay
The game centers about climbing around the game world, slowly growing your vine upwards. To grow the vine, you must crawl up the vine to various red flowers, which you can then command to grow outwards. Each of these will sprout bouncy leaves, to help you ascend a bit faster, and additional red flowers, to allow you to grow additional vines. There are 100 small crystals hidden around the various floating islands in the game, and collecting those power up your robot’s jetpack; there are also large crystal islands, which you must direct the growth of the vines into in order to grow the main vine higher and burst through various barriers and reach the top of the map. There are also a number of things you can drag into your various telepods – locations you can teleport back to when you die – which unlock entries in a data bank.
That is literally 100% of the gameplay, and it is very dull. The controls for your robot are terrible, and carrying things around is extremely tedious, as you can easily drop them while doing other tasks. Climbing is an arduous process of alternating clicks of the shoulder buttons, and is made all the worse when the surface is uneven. Jumping and using your jetpack feels a little better, but is still very awkward, and it is easy to miss jumps and fall to your doom. A few pick-upable items – a flower which slows your descent, and a glide leaf which lets you glide around like on a hangglider – do little to spruce up the gameplay.
All in all, the game is a very tedious process of ascending the vine and growing it outwards, then upwards, then outwards again; less than half an hour into the game, you have seen everything it has to offer. If you don’t bother to collect the collectables, you could easily beat the entire game in an hour, and you’d still think it was too long. Collecting the collectables is tedious – most of environmental items you collect for the databank aren’t too bad, but a few have to be lugged large distances while suffering from the dodgy controls.
The small crystals, on the other hand, are extremely tedious to find; the only hint to their presence is an audio cue when the camera is close to them, which means that at the end of the game, if you’re missing any crystals, finding the rest of them is a matter of pure chance. Many are hidden in places which aren’t readily visible while gliding around, making this primarily a job for consulting a FAQ – if you were bothered to do it, which you really shouldn’t bother to do.
Graphics
The game has graphics which would have been an embarrassment in the Playstation 1 era; they’re ugly and unappealing, and the creatures in the game look terrible. The only thing which looks at all passable is the world from great elevation; it slowly becomes increasingly spherical around the horizon, and from a great distance, the vines and islands look somewhat visually appealing. Unfortunately, you will spend very little of the game admiring this, and most of the game looking at low-resolution textures and extremely blocky polygonal vines.
Final Summary
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to spend your time, let alone your money, on this game. If it was a school project, I might be impressed, but as an actual commercial release, it is just not up to snuff. It is boring, tedious, repetitive, and yet manages to annoy you even though the entire game is likely to take no more than a few hours to complete.
Save your money and your time and do other things.… Expand
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