10/28/2022 0 Comments Botanicula![]() ![]() ![]() But for all that, they aren’t really what I’d call “difficult.” And that’s okay – a game which wants to appeal to small children and non-gamers in general should definitely have a more welcoming difficulty level. Botanicula will have you hopping around tiny planets, traveling around in submarines, and exploring a little chestnut village. The second tier of difficulty is the meat of the game – the puzzles which stand in the way of important quest items. They’re the sort of thing that can make your mouth pop open in pleasant surprise, and they really showcase Amanita’s ability to make even a mushroom heartwarming, but they’re not really “puzzles,” as such. These are cute, and the character designs are extremely charming, but not particularly rewarding as puzzles. Puzzles are sort of organized into informal groupings – the easiest being small creatures which you can simply click on a couple of times to watch a small animation play out. The core of the point’n’click genre is the puzzles, and while Botanicula has a whole ecosystem of them, I have to admit I have mixed feelings about the difficulty level. For a moment, without an understanding of the incentive behind collecting cards, it’s easy to form a mindset of, “if all I’m going to get for playing with minor characters is a stupid card, I might as well not do it at all!” And then a giant, One-Man-Band bug drops out of the sky and is thrown into hilarious, clattering, whomping disarray as it’s chased offscreen, and you remember that the incentive has nothing to do with cards or points anyway. The concept of quest items and cards is pretty badly explained at the start of the game, and stands out as the one moment where it would have been forgivable to break Amanita’s no-text-or-dialog rule. The general aim of the game is to help all of the characters in each zone while collecting quest items as well as cards which increase your score at the end of the game. Instead of crippling understanding of the objective, Botanicula’s lack of dialog centers the game in its simplicity. Botanicula series#Any character which is supposed to be speaking talks in a garbled series of mouth-noises, while a speech bubble communicates the gist of what they’re trying to get across. ![]() The gang navigates from screen to screen, helping various bugs, small animals, and plants. Mushroom, and though you almost never control any of them independently and they have no real spoken dialog besides various whoops, cheers, and nervous gasps, they pack a lot of charm. Lantern travels in a big whooping mob with his four other plant and fungus friends. However, just as the seeds are about to fall from the tree, a giant spider comes and sucks the life out of all but one of them, which drops from the tree just in time and lands in the care of the first of the main characters, Mr. In its opening moments, you’re introduced to the general shape of the story – the continuation of life in Botanicula’s ecosystem depends on the germination of the large glowing seeds of the trees on which all the species of the forest live. Expectations will be different for every type of person who picks it up, so I aim to look at Botanicula’s ability to appeal to a diverse audience, as well as its merit against other Amanita titles.įrom the very beginning, Botanicula is a simple game. With such a large target audience, reviewing Botanicula requires an adjusted metric. As their website puts it, Botanicula is a “relaxed game perfect for hardcore gamers, their partners, families and seniors.” The Czech indie developer churned out five short point and click games between 20, and more recently, the full-length hit Machinarium in 2009, and most recently on April 19, Botanicula.Īnd, Botanicula has won over the wallets of a lot of people already, despite some awkwardness between pre-orders on GOG and the Humble Bundle.īotanicula’s largest competition is really only other Amanita titles, as other point’n’click titles, like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (which Jeroen reviewed earlier this week) appeal to a different audience. “Point and click adventure games are dead” carries no weight, going by Amanita Games’ release library. ![]()
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