Grow Home does not feel like a complete game. The pretty visuals and very nice sound effects are pasted on top of a thin game. In controlling a small explorer robot on an alien planet, you're tasked with awkwardly climbing around sparse, featureless environments in order to find dull collectibles which give you largely uninteresting movement and control upgrades in order to help you climb higher. There is no challenge to the game other than the awkward, momentum driven controls. You stumble your way from vine to vine of the large plant you are trying to "grow" by extending branches into easily visible energy sources again and again. It's easy, repetitive, slow and really quite tedious. Finding the 100 collectibles around the environment is a simple matter of following the hum of the crystals you're trying to find and walking towards it like looking for a cricket in a field. It's about as interesting as that. After you've completed the game, you're asked to go back and find some more, equally uninteresting collectibles. The presentation is nice, particularly the little verbalisations of your robot, but the game itself is overly shallow and straightforward in every aspect other than the one that would count, the game's controls. They fight against you for the entire game, short as it is. Though there is some satisfaction in overcoming them, this is hardly a design feature to be praised.
