Everything feels suitably organic: the plants aren’t just going to grow exactly as you want, and the junk you pile up might tumble in the direction you were hoping it wouldn’t. The execution of this task is not an exact science, however. Cloud Gardens is a far moodier shade of chill. A game where the apocalypse is happily solved by liberal greenwashing would be saccharine and flat.
There’s something bittersweet about the commingling of growth and decay. As a result, success comes not from merely covering rundown worlds in beautiful green, but rather from creating an unkempt pile of creeping knotweeds and detritus. These objects are just junk: empty cans, derelict vehicles, shopping trolleys, road signs…. The plant’s growth is stimulated by placing objects in its vicinity. Starting with a barren, distressed, post-urban wasteland, you place a seed to start a plant growing from a surface. This is not a collectathon or compare-the-stats scenario – things just get collected as you encounter them, giving a suggestion of progress.Įach diorama is completed by growing plants and placing objects. Second, the items you can place and seeds you can plant in these scenes are labelled and categorised and stored in your catalogue for future use. This keeps things tight, with no sprawling convolutions to get your head around.
This sort of thing can be a bit meandering, but Noio has installed some clever guide rails around its post-apocalyptic playground to keep it moving along at just the pace you want.įirst, the main game comprises compact dioramas presented in sequence, each needing to be completed to move to the next. It ticks the critical boxes: open-ended, low-pressure gameplay wistful ambient music and graphics in colours muted enough and pixels chunky enough not to overcommit to anything. Cloud Gardens places itself in the rapidly expanding game genre “chill”.
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