Calling Botanicula a game on rails, is akin to calling it an adventure game its net effect is greater than the sum of its parts.Īnd sometimes, for no apparent reason, things can get downright trippy, (which is of course, a good thing):īotanicula – in-game screenshot – Mushrooms might get trippy Not in a year that brought us such thought-provoking offerings as Dear Esther and Thomas Was Alone. I can not base my analysis of this game on its mechanics alone. Without the use of any language, the game is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. There is something else going on here though – and that is that the implicit humor, the sense of discovery and joy it elicits, the emotional storytelling, all conveyed without dialogue is a rare feat in and of itself. The non-linearity creates a sense of variety that gives the game a high replay value. Often you must digress into an entirely new puzzle in order to solve one from a previous stage. There are many different roads you can follow that branch off (pun intended) into a huge variety of new environments, and in each of these seemingly a new means of interacting is introduced, be it a treasure map, or use for an ability, or manner of dealing with the ever-growing list of causalities you trigger. Though I still take issue with puzzles that are more about trial-and-error than logic.Ī second or third playthrough reveal that the game is not as linear as it may have seemed at first.
Added together these combine to create something that feels more like gameplay and less like an interactive storybook.
#STEAM BOTANICULA SERIES#
Levels comprise a variety of challenges – from collecting a series of objects to finding the right combination of actions to activating various elements in concert in order to progress. If that appeals to you, then you are in the right place. Clicking on the various objects around you usually also triggers some sort of musical cue or sound effect, rendering the experience akin to visiting a Science Center where, though you are not doing any science per se, you can have a lot of fun pressing buttons and pulling levers to witness its effects. There is very little, if any, opportunity for emergent play here, but given the title’s highly specific design considerations, this is understandable, add to which the number of bonus discoveries that are not a part of the main storyline more than make up for this.Īs you progress through the world, though, you begin to discover and thus catalog the wide variety of species that you encounter. Once things get rolling the interplay between the respective critters’ special skills becomes an intriguing challenge. Having said that, the outcome of finding said hotpoints in any given level is often rewarding and continually overrides the frustration it has induced. Herein lives my primary gripe with the game, and with all of Amanita’s designs in that they can sometimes be a bit of a pixel-hunt as opposed to a game proper. In terms of game mechanics this translates to more of a point-and-discover in an interactive sense than puzzle-solving, but the puzzles do emerge and are only moderately more forgiving, at least at first, than those with which you are first confronted in the oftentimes exasperating Machinarium – Amanita’s previous title. They make their way through a variety of flora and foliage in a quest to solve the problem of vampiric invaders that threaten their ecology. This winsome, adorable title features brilliant sound design by the same people who created its soundtrack in concert with a living breathing world that feels like an animated version of Richard Heighway’s illustration for Aesop’s Fables.īotanicula as a game is about five little tree-dwelling creatures – something like a twig insect, a mushroom, a bulb, a feather, and a seed-pod presumably – each with a special skill unique to it (feather can fly-over, twig can flip upside down, etc). What We Think:Īn intuitive, wordless, symbolically-driven UI immediately belies the seamless marriage of elements that comprise Botanicula’s design. The original soundtrack and sound effects are created by Czech alternative band DVA. It’s about a bunch of five friends – little tree creatures who set out for a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites. Botanicula is point’n’click exploration game created by Jaromír Plachý and Amanita Design.
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