It was satisfying, and a complete joy to play. Look around, learn the landscape, take back the barren wasteland. Turns out this is exactly the way to go into the game.
CLOUD GARDENS HOW TO
I didn’t know what to expect from this game or how to approach it. Gamers tend to snap up the big, bold action-packed titles, or really well known and highly talked about Indies. It’s an exercise in finding balance and it’s a gentle reminder to look beyond what you see on the surface, perhaps a bigger teaching moment than I’ve had in a game in some time.Ĭloud Gardens gave me a moment to reflect how lucky I am to do things like this, to play games I likely never would have looked at if wasn’t given the opportunity to review them. It’s a game about growth, beauty and the lovely wild things that can spring up in unexpected places. It’s part garden simulator, part dystopian landscape designer, part puzzler and so much more. Cloud Gardens is a unique experience that is hard to describe or compare to anything else I’ve played before.
It had a very meditative quality that would be something you would hear in a yoga studio or spa environment. The entire game of Cloud Gardens has a serene and Zen like quality to it, and as you would expect, the music used for its soundtrack also contributes to this feeling. None of these things took away from my overall enjoyment of the game though. Camera movement wasn’t always easy to get a good angle, and physics-based stacking of items often became frustrating when they didn’t act as they should. Perhaps I felt a little like Bob Ross in some moments, planting ‘happy little trees’.Īs with most point and click style games that I’ve played on console, the controls aren’t as smooth as they could be. It’s like a beautiful watercolour that slowly reveals itself on a canvas. The game doesn’t have high resolution graphics and isn’t hyper realistic, but I think this lends to its charm. Using your garbage arsenal wisely comes into play as you hit higher levels with less items available to place around. But as with all sowing and reaping, this is inevitably a game about balance. Each new level gave me the opportunity to rotate the camera, trying to find the perfect place to plant the seeds or place the items I was given to create the best garden. In the time it took me to understand how Cloud Gardens really worked, I’d gone on an emotional journey from fleeting confusion to intense focus on the game levels. You’re never quite sure what will grow or how it will flourish. In that way I guess it’s like real gardening.
CLOUD GARDENS TRIAL
There is no tutorial for Cloud Gardens, no explanation as to how the seeds grow, which will cover the most space or require the most resources to generate a seed, it’s simply trial and error. Once you knew what artifacts you would get as you covered more of the space, you could make a better plan the second or third time around. The larger, complex ones were my favourites to go back and repeat. I think the largest I encountered was 6 sections. Sometimes it was simply one area to complete and move on, while sometimes a scene would continue on to a larger diorama. Each scene is potentially part of a larger scene. I found it to be very relaxing and since the game has the ability to jump around and play levels as you want, as I could play my favourite areas more than once. Taking back the dead land and making it alive again lit a spark. I loved creating spaces with the artifacts to set a scene and a story in my head about what may have happened before the people simply disappeared.Īs someone who has worked on volunteer reclamation projects in cities with abandoned plots of land, I found this game very rewarding. I immediately jumped back in and just kept wanting to play more and more.
It’s a quick restart though and addictive. Most levels are easy to complete but there is a fail state, and I did fail a few levels, either by running out of plant material or décor items. You grow your plants and place items in any way you see fit with the goal to ‘cover 100%’ of the map indicated with a percentage gauge in the bottom corner. As the seeds grow you harvest their flowers/fruit, and that harvest in turn fills the gauge you need to plant additional seeds. It’s a strange mechanic, where garbage is essentially your fertilizer. While placing the item, you can see its area of influence-with larger items usually causing more growth. Placing items (mostly garbage and junk items) coaxes your plants to grow. There are various types of plants and tree seeds you will unlock and can choose from, as well as water supply ‘seed’. There are four different locations to play around in: Highways, a junkyard, rooftops, and a greenhouse. Cloud Gardens tasks you with planting seeds and growing plants over scenes of urban decay.
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