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Website: https://www.growbotgame.com/
Price: $19 US
Blurb: “Growbot is a 2D point-and-click adventure about a robot saving her home from a dark crystalline force. Set upon a beautiful biopunk space station, you play as Nara, a growbot in training to become a captain. When your station home is attacked by rapidly growing crystals, it's down to you to save it.”
Like many stories, you are a junior in training, with big aspirations – to become the captain of a ship. The game takes inspiration from Machinarium, but with a floral theme. The story revolves around Nara who is thrown into the deep end on her(?) first day at her new assignment. Nara is a robot after all. The captain is missing, and the ship is damaged. If we compare this to our last review, Virtuaverse, this is in another league. There are no moon puzzles, no clicking around the screen hunting for the odd pixel out, no running twenty screens up and down looking for stuff, and no unlimited inventory. The interface is not in your face either. The ship you are in is limited in size, so there are only so many rooms to explore. Without moon puzzles, the game does not require a hint system (there is a spacebar that will tell you what you can interact with). That said, some of the puzzles are auditory. This again harkens back to Loom from Lucas arts, the first point-and-click game many people played. As the ship is only so big, the game is rather short and that brings us to the only gripe I have with the game, the ending, but more about that later.
The game describes itself as biopunk, but to me it is more robots in space. Anyway, the atmosphere is contrastingly colorful in the void of space. The game is aimed at beginners to the genre, as puzzle quests usually start at the first screen of an area, and you need to go in deeper to solve it. There is a guidebook too, for your perusal. The idea of having ‘consumables’ and ‘keepables’ is a nice touch.
In the menu, you have a pink bug/animal living in your head, but when the game starts, you have only lily pads and I am sure it is not a frog. Though I did chuckle – thinking of it as a skinless frog. It is in actual fact, a brainpillia. I am not sure if it is an attempt at humour, or the developers could not find a name for it as it looks like a tick that whistles like a bird.
The unlocking sequences require decent sound, just by the way, the tinny speakers on my craptop made the game a lot harder than it ought to be. For a game that uses sounds to solve puzzles, the game music was on loop and got on my nerves real quick. To add insult to injury, the “enemy” in the game are crystals, and the music loop sounds like it was made on crystals. The music is credited to this weird lady: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMXlGR3qqPY By the looks of it, she is French, so there’s that.
I found that a lot of the puzzles are sequence based. It is not a bad thing, just an observation. Let’s face it, with point-and-click games, it is all about the story and the puzzles. Don’t know much about Wabi Sabi games, but their website is really crappy and their twitter page is in Spanish. Still, I think it is a small team of developers who did good. Machinarium was a feel-good puzzler and this is too. I liked that spaces changed; for instance an empty room may have a character in it later on in the game. This made the game feel more alive – not saying it was dead, as even repairing the plants, you only heal like tears, there are no dead spaces. I am not talking about the frozen characters, or robot with a broken dome though.
Overall this is a cutesy game with an interesting mechanic in a very limited space. It may have been nice if the game continued on the planet below, but that is a nice-to-have, not a deal breaker. As this is aimed at newcomers to the genre, the play time may have an effect, so keeping it short n’ sweet is the right thing to do.
The ending is a letdown. I will put it out there, but I will not spoil it (the kissy sounds and the throbbing hearts for “best friends” in the sequence was also weird), and the music is mediocre at best. The sims-type talking also did not fit the game – you are a robot, not Aquaman.
I would not spend $20 (about $300 NAD) for this game, though there is nothing wrong with it, I would rather wait for a sale as there is really no replay value in it.