Grow Home (PC) Review

My girlfriend is trying to become a presence on Twitch. I, too, have toyed with the idea, but I don’t have the perseverance to stream every day. What does this all have to do with Grow Home? Well, part of being found on Twitch is playing games that have just come out. I happened to stumble upon Grow Home and figured I might as well check it out for her.

Grow Home is now the game that I consider the best game I have played in 2015 and is definitely in my top ten most favourite games ever played.

Part of the F.A.M.

You start off on a planet assigned with a task from your M.O.M.: grow a plant and make sure the planet becomes shock-full of oxygen. Now this all sounds simple enough, and it pretty much is. But you can’t fully appreciate how amazing the game is without seeing how gorgeous it looks. With its low polygon graphics and bright colours, it makes an otherwise simple world into an intriguing one.

Besides the look of the game, B.U.D. is plain fun to play as. Your movements feel a bit clunky at first, but you slowly become used to playing as an adorable robot. It’s a good thing the first ‘’level’’ is just a field, because the world becomes increasingly less forgiving the higher you get.

Clutch’Em Grab’Em Robot

So, you’re a robot, not a fancy one, just a good old-fashioned robot with claws as hands. You are in charge of growing a plant, and you have no idea where to start. Walking straight ahead sounds like a solid idea, but then you come across a mountain. Here comes the first tool B.U.D. has: his mechanical claws. You can climb, grab and hold anything. To fully appreciate this, you have to play it with a controller. Nothing makes you hold those back triggers more than being upside down to get that one power gem.

Another fun activity is riding a blooming flower. You have to hold tight as you steer it through the sky. It has a function though, the flowers are the power lines of the plant. The plant can only grow if you steer enough of the flowers into floating islands that function as power plants.

Collect them all

Floating islands, crystals and seeds. There is a ton of collecting to do in Grow Home, and everything has a use. Since the world is separated in layers, crash some flowers into the ground to access to every gem. The more crystals you collect, the more pimped out B.U.D. becomes. Before you know it, you’ll be flying around everywhere with your very own jet-pack.

My favourite means of transportation has to be the glider. When you combine this with your jet-pack, you can basically drift endlessly. And that’s a good thing, because so far I still haven’t found all the collectables, even with the ultimate flying combination.

Final thoughts

Much like the robot who, in the game, is doing an experiment, the game itself came about as a pet project within the Ubisoft Reflections team. It quickly grew from a fun little side thing to a full blown release. My hope is that this game will be picked up by a big Youtuber so that it encourages more games like this one to be released.

I have absolutely fallen in love with this game and I hope they will expand on it. They can go into all kinds of crazy directions; the team responsible has certainly shown how creative they can be. For only eight measly euro, you can have a great experience. Exploring every nook and cranny of the world is so very satisfying. This is one of the few games that I boot up after having finished the story, it is just that fun to play.