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description=Cloud Gardens is a game by any definition. If you re someone who thinks that games describes something that s inherently and centrally about challenge, progression, and victory states - then we are never going to agree on this, first of all. But the thing is, Cloud Gardens has got all those. They re pretty conspicuous, even. They re…;

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cloud gardens these heterogenous tasks these heterogenous tasks haphazard thoughts on game design and narrative skip to content home about what my comp votes mean my games the semiosis part if comp 2021 the mermaids of ganymede cloud gardens posted on september 8 2021 by sam kabo ashwell cloud gardens is a game by any definition if you re someone who thinks that games describes something that s inherently and centrally about challenge progression and victory states then we are never going to agree on this first of all but the thing is cloud gardens has got all those they re pretty conspicuous even they re tools that it uses what it doesn t do is design around them as the point of games the thing you do in cloud gardens is to place objects inside little urban wasteland scenes you can place seeds which attach themselves to the scenery or bits of scrap from tiny beer bottles to road signs to entire cars or rooms some of the scrap bits also glue on and some have gravity and collision physics and will drop into place topple and roll around if not placed in a stable spot and a lot of the levels are pretty vertical every piece of scrap has a radius of effect when placed and plants within that radius grow a bit scrap bits destroy any sections of plant they directly touch when first placed but after that plants can grow over or be planted directly onto them when plants grow enough they produce flowers and fruit which you can harvest for new seeds to finish a level or advance it to the next stage you need a certain amount of plant cover this has the shape of a puzzle you have limited resources space scrap initial seeds and have to make efficient use of them you can make mistakes trying to prop one car up on top of another only to have it topple over and crush lots of plants there are lots of games that play around with this kind of optimal placement puzzle the question of i want each piece of scrap to affect as many plants as possible but also i don t want to put down too many plants and not leave room for future scrap is very familiar the authors could have designed this as a tight little optimisation puzzle game but they very much didn t every level of the game despite being a confined space with finite resources is really easy to overcome the level complete notification is pretty subtle you can keep playing after it s done and often i didn t notice i d won until some time after most of the time you have way way more than you needed by the end cloud gardens isn t a game about careful optimisation with scarce resources you re given way more scrap than you need to solve the level which converts into way more seeds which you multiply with yet more scrap by the level s end you usually have a space teeming with flowers and fruit that you never had to pick there s no score no bonus for it so you may as well go with whatever s prettiest this is a game about abundance cloud gardens feels like when i was foraging wildfoods in bush alaska one of the fruits of late fall is the highbush cranberry highbush grows over a lot of the pacific northwest it s a straggly in between plant a very spindly sapling or a very sparse bush there s a lot of variation by local climate the more rain the more abundant and sweeter the fruit it s always a bit too tart to eat in handfuls off the tree but it s the difference between pleasantly sharp and mouth shriveling drown in sugar before touching sharp and in yakutat it rains i d go out to gather and feel overwhelmed with the glut every bush was heaving with more plump red berries than seemed plausible i could pick more than needed with minimal effort and there s a special feeling there the particular joy of this is so much of will this be enough being a distant speck in the rear view mirror there are rewards for progression paced in a game like manner you start out with very few kinds of plant quickly unlock a few more and then gradually get others different plants have different strengths the wisteria grows kinda small but has hanging flower vines that reach into open space the ferns cover up surfaces indiscriminately but take a long time to produce the broadleaf tree is big and slow growing and offers lots of fruit but these powers overlap a fair bit such that there s rarely an obviously correct plant for a particular spot and that lets you treat this as an aesthetic choice i often found myself wanting to exclude or emphasize particular plants to get a distinct feel for a level putting down a cactus changes the whole mood which is a big part of how actual gardening works but only one part a lot of gardening games look at gardening and decide that it s mainly about diligence and patience be sure to water all the things regularly harvest at the right time and so on do the small tasks of regular maintenance over and over dedicate time to them and things will grow that s a critical quality for a real world gardener to be a good gardener you don t just have to love green things and fresh produce you have to love low key grind my mother s like that she really enjoys taking a chunk of her day to water and tend and monitor everything it s not a chore for her it s how she chills out and she has a very lovely garden as a result i love green things but i don t get much out of this part and do not stick well with it and this for a gardener is an absolutely fatal flaw but there are lots of other aspects of gardening and a gardening game doesn t have to focus on all of them i have yet to see a gardening game that s mostly about considering sunlight soil type and drainage which to real life gardens are as the law and the prophets and i can t picture what such a game would look like beyond an opaque spreadsheet sim cloud gardens is concerned with the design part of gardening the curation and arrangement putting plants down in a particular way thinking about how they ll grow into the space and then you just get to see that happen and be around the resulting green space without any grind required so as genre goes this is most obviously a chill game right it s got ambient music which you will absolutely not remember but if you try to play it without the music it ll feel like a strange lifeless experience but it s a chill game which okay so often the question of player action seems like you have limited options either player activity is about challenge or it s about perpetual grind or it doesn t really matter and it s just click to continue or it s a directionless creative mode and cloud gardens is sort of a lichen all and none and more than the sum of its parts carving out its own odd little niche aesthetics are a big deal here it s a game of little voxels the author worked on kingdom which was similarly a pixel art game heavily reliant on atmosphere and visual mood the overall effect though is not a million miles from the original myst calm artefact worlds small enough to fit in the palm of the hand constructed in oddly enjambed ways and then abandoned part of that means that you are also at times doing some light architecture sticking arches onto pillars concrete slabs onto other concrete slabs stacking boxy rooms into little towers taken purely on its technical qualities this is kind of a weak element the bits snap onto one another okay but rotation can be a bit awkward and the camera often doesn t cooperate as nicely as it could and but this doesn t matter too much really for one thing there s the brutalist principle that you can make a really ungainly building made of weird bad shapes and as long as you integrate a lot of plants into it it ll look great then well these are ruins and unearthly ruins floating in a sea of mists at that so it s not jarring if your arrangement doesn t entirely make sense a lot of gardening games are about taking untouched or neglected land and improving it which in general means clearance and irrigation erasing everything distinctive about the land in order to make it suitable to plant anything you want here you re working in very anthropic environments there s no wilderness here everything is a fragment of bridge or train station and you re not converting city back to wilderness not entirely you keep throwing more garbage in there rubber ducks and road signs and rusted out cars and broken cathode ray tvs and you re doing so in ways that are useless to people stairways get blocked because you need a place to pop down that table or that vending machine you jam down bench seats across train tracks because that s where it ll boost the most plants the space has more and more man made shit in it while getting less and less useful and comprehensible for human use this too is abundance but not in any economic sense you re not harvesting fruit for consumption or for money just for more seeds for the land itself the only animals are the crows perhaps you re making this world for them i honestly think tropico s the closest here which considers elevation rainfall and i think something like fertility or soil richness for the productivity of farms and i am told that sakuna rice and ruin has similarly fiddly systems for rice terroir share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook like loading related this entry was posted in uncategorized bookmark the permalink the semiosis part if comp 2021 the mermaids of ganymede leave a comment cancel reply δ search for recent posts if comp 2024 birding in pope lick park eric lathrop if comp 2022 the thirty nine steps if comp 2021 goat game if comp 2021 the last night of alexisgrad if comp 2021 the mermaids of ganymede recent comments kathryn li on if comp 2021 goat game milo van mesdag on if comp 2021 the last night o george parr on eastshade fantasy without narrative design wi on standard patterns in choice ba michael on house of danger cyoa book to archives september 2024 october 2022 october 2021 september 2021 march 2020 november 2019 october 2019 september 2019 august 2019 july 2019 may 2019 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