Our Personal Space was a great visual novel that did a fantastic job of making you feel like you built a life for yourself on a differentOur Personal Space was a great visual novel that did a fantastic job of making you feel like you built a life for yourself on a different planet. Space to Grow took that and expanded on it in various ways. You can’t import your old save game, which is one of my only complaints, but luckily for me the choices they had made for the start of this game were pretty close to what I had made in the original. The game still had a management aspect to it, this time you have to manage your crops. You pick what to grow and have to manage crop choices; budgets; nutrition; and nitrogen levels which can force you to relocate crops. Just as in the original I found the managerial aspects to be easy to get into and satisfying rather than a burden that had to be overcome. You also have to manage your relationship to your kids and wife but once again it felt like a natural result of your choices rather than simply a matter of stats. Just as in the original there was a great feeling to the everyday problems the game tackles and did a great job of inserting various ethical and moral issues into the game without feeling forced. There was humour; sadness; drama; even a mystery and all added to the overall story. You can also create poems in game but luckily that is optional as it isn’t my forte. A couple of nitpicks I can give would be that I was able to accumulate way more money than I needed. Maybe I am just a good farmer, but having more things that I could have bought would have been nice. I bought every last thing I could and still had tens of thousands of credits left at the end. The only other nitpick I have is there was a few scenes where the game said I was wearing rain gear but my character on screen was just in the rain wearing a t-shirt. Tiny nitpicks are all I have because the rest of the game was fantastic. There were times where I didn’t quite agree with the dialogue but thankfully I got the chance to pick dialogue options that better agreed on where I wanted to take that conversation or issue.
I played Space to Grow on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice spelling errors or bugs. You can save anytime you want and the game has 36 save slots for that. It does auto save at certain points if you prefer.
Game Engine: Ren’Py
Save System: Manual and Auto
Disk Space Used: 449 MB
Game Version Played: 1.0
CPU Usage: 2-19 %
RAM Usage: 1.8-2.4 GB
The heart of the game is a family simulator but it takes what could have been a stats game and adds loads of depth and characters worth caring about. By the end you feel like you lived a full life. You don’t have to have played the original to understand every bit of Space to Grow but I recommend it. It’s a great game in it’s own right and also free. I finished this game in 7 hours and 16 minutes and I paid $5.13 CAD for it and it is easily worth that money and then some. I can’t even bring myself to deduct any score for my nitpicks due to how much I enjoyed the game.
My Score: 10/10
My System:
Intel I7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-2133 | Intel HD 530 | Mesa 20.0.8 | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.13.12-gnu… Expand
