EPTI’m given to believe No Man's Sky had elicited a great deal of expectation based purely off of a few trailers and surely in a world after Aliens: Colonial Marines, Dead Island, Spore, Watch_Dogs and Duke Nukem Forever were shown to be horribly fraudulent you’d think gaming’s collective heart has been broken too many times and that we’d stop being stupid arseholes when it comes to being excited about games that don’t actually exist yet. Wake up sheeple, and embrace this hit new craze I like to call cynicism. And now to talk about a game I wanted to enjoy as soon as I saw it had been announced: Grow Up, a fucking walking simulator for babies. And it's predecessor Grow Home since none of you know what the crap a Grow Up is.
Last week I fear I might have touched a nerve when I commented that Pokemon was a game for kids with more than a little disdain. Whilst Pokemon certainly is a game for the kiddies there’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying kids media on occasion, just as long as there’s no Rule 37 style Google searches afterwards. My qualm with Pokemon is that as a grown up it felt weird is all. With a complete lack of a maturity requirement for the thematic tones (accidental dicks aside), Grow Up is definitely suitable for children. Or at least not unsuitable, I’ve not actually got any kids to play it and I’m not allowed near the local Primary Schools for reasons my lawyers have advised me not to disclose.
Grow Up is the sequel to Grow Home, one of Ubisoft’s indie style projects they like to spend some of the the Assassin’s Creed profit on and delude people into thinking there’s still some artistic credibility left in the ol’ juggernaut, see also Child of Light and Valiant Hearts. Grow Home is a simple game of horticultural platforming. You play as BUD, a childlike robot, who gets knocked out of his spaceship called MOM and has to grow a Star Plant into a biological space elevator in order to be reunited. It’s short and peaceful and I kinda loved it and not just for the unintentional hilarity of the Star Plant looking more than a bit like a huge penis and the Freudian imagery of trying to extend it to connect with mum.
I have a peculiar fondness for games that are about being a tiny thing exploring an impossibly vast area, basically the opposite of claustrophobia. I can ignore flaws in the raw gameplay an awful lot as long as the tone and atmosphere are spot on and that’s kinda the case with these Grow games. BUD stumbles around a clumsy awkward arsehole most of the time like he doesn’t really know how his body works but that’s ok cuz this ain’t Super Meat Boy. These are games about the majesty of a massive draw distance. If a picture says a thousand words, then imagine these screenshots saying “Shitting Blimey” about five hundred times.
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There’s a lot of games out there with climbing sections whose attempt to simulate an epic backdrop is undercut by the actual gameplay taking place in a tiny squash court sized section of wall (looking at you Tomb Raider 2013). These Grow games posit that dangling from a rock levitating several miles above sea level is made all the more exciting by there actually being several miles to fall. You don’t need to have a bunch of shit occurring on the screen to suggest something exciting is going on, just let the game’s tangible sense of bigness occur naturally through the environment. It works pretty damn well!
The easiest way to make a sequel is to make the first thing again just with more stuff and that’s Grow Up in a nutshell. You’ve got a few more movement abilities and an entire planetoid to jetpack, glide and clamber around as you search for icons on the Ubisoft “Map o’ collectibles™”.The key difference between Up and Home is that Home is a game about creating the level as you play and Up is more about navigating a level given to you. Really lovely level, mind you, an absolute delight to manoeuvre around, but it’s a more mundane sort of special. There’s nothing as awe inspiring as in Grow Home where you gaze down upon the miles of plant skyscraper you created and muse something along the lines of “well bugger me, aren’t games wonderful these days” before performing a four mile high body slam upon the earth.
There's some other minor nitpicks I can indulge but I find myself more forgiving of those. The textures are kinda shitty but that feels like a compromise for the draw distance and the limited budget. The music is repetitive and bland but you can easily substitute your own. There’s not much to the writing but it carries itself with an easy gentle humour and has nary a word out of place. They’re short games but reasonably priced, certainly worth a few good evenings, consider adding booze.
Despite all that Grow Home/Up feels like a game that was tailor made for people like me and if this piece gives you the impression that you might just love it too then check it out. And that's the bottom line. Join me next week where I'll talk about the new Dues Ex or something.
