Grow Home Review

Let's hope you're really blown away by that prospect, as there's not a whole lot else to do, I'm afraid, and of the stuff you can do, most of it is pretty typical of a sandbox in the sense that it's totally inconsequential. In the best traditions of frontier explorers throughout time and space, you can terrorise the local wildlife, uproot all the flora, set up machines to serve your own convenience – in this case, quick-travel teleporters – and last but not least, bleed the land of natural resources, by which I mean 'collect blue crystals'. Yep, that's how you know this is a Ubisoft game: somebody thought a hundred-piece scavenger hunt was just what this open world was in dire need of. Alright, as far as scavenger hunts go it's not too bad: it's not obligatory, you get a nice obvious sound cue as long as you're somewhere in a crystal's vicinity, tangible gameplay rewards at fairly-regular intervals – including a jetpack, which is one hundred percent guaranteed to improve any sandbox – and most importantly of all, it actually provides an incentive to explore every last inch of the alien planet – or at least, the vertical slice of it that's been made available to you.

Let me try to make “incentive to explore” sound less like the hollow game journo fluff it usually is. See, exploration in open world games is almost always carried out in the interests of finding stuff that's useful to gameplay. Whether it's Liberty City or Skyrim, what you're out for usually isn't so much the discovery of the world itself – exquisitely detailed though it be – as the bits of it specifically relevant to you, the player: collectibles, loot, shortcuts, the secret rocket launcher spawn, etcetera. Exploring for the sake of the environment often just reveals how utterly predictable it really is; a city is full of buildings, cars, and people, and you know for certain that you'll find those wherever you go. An alien planet with minimum gameplay distractions, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of place where you can explore in search of things to see, not things to stuff in your backpack. There are no real ground rules on what is and isn't congruous; you can poke your nose into every corner of the world, not really having any idea what you'll find, and it's this driving force, far more than that of your gardening responsibilities, that keeps you moving onwards and upwards.

Well, up to a point, that is. Around halfway up there's a sense that the game is running low on steam in terms of environment design: the beautiful floating islands, home to secret caves and bizarre wildlife, give way to a dozen or so uninteresting rocks spread across a space as large and featureless as gm_flatgrass. I have a sneaking suspicion that this was put there to give you a chance to really go nuts with the stalk and grow it into an impenetrable lime-green canopy – as you'll probably end up doing anyway – but it doesn't work, for the same reason you wouldn't set the new Grand Theft Auto on the surface of Pluto: your method of transport is only as interesting as the environments it interacts with. Grab an offshoot, point it at the nearest glowing energy rock, wish you could engage warp speed, rinse and repeat. Several acres of empty space, needless to say, aren't particularly exciting to interact with, and while I'm sure you could make an argument for it being nothing more than a canvas on which to demonstrate your space-gardening talents, the simple truth is that one patch of plant-ridden sky looks and plays pretty much like another – which is to say, like being inside a giant game of extraterrestrial Kerplunk.

I suppose my big problem with Grow Home isn't that it does something wrong so much as it doesn't do much of anything at all. Ubisoft's blog all but admits that this all started off as an experimental little curiosity with no real ambitions, and that's exactly what it feels like: a couple of unusual, clever ideas made sellable with the addition of a single objective and some arbitrary collectibles. I'm not going to go into “is this a game” territory here, because frankly I've never seen anybody argue that topic without producing a mile-high pile of unnecessary semantic garbage, but Grow Home is definitely pretty light on the ground when it comes to gameplay. Oh, but wait, once you grow your beanstalk all the way to the top, you get an all-new, once-in-a-lifetime, exclusive post-credits objective: another scavenger hunt, this time without even the thin justification of exploration. What a jip.

And yet, Grow Home gets a recommendation. No, it gets more than a recommendation: it gets my bated anticipation for those that follow in its wake. Even standing alone, it's a cute exploration game with unique, satisfying climbing mechanics, but far more significant is what it represents. I want more Grow Homes; I want giant multinational game developers to let their team members off the leash once in a while just to see what weird, experimental stuff they come up with. It's only healthy, you know.

Failing that, a new Assassin's Creed with these climbing mechanics would be a real hoot.