Go! Go! GOTY! 2017: Game Five: TumbleSeed

• Game: Aeiowu's TumbleSeed.
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: Here. (Brad/Jeff.)
• Started: 6/12.
• Completed: N/A.

Man, I might have to call a moratorium on roguelikes and roguelites for a while. I think the reason I ended up with so many this year was due to that Day of the Devs bundle from Double Fine a few weeks back (it's also where I got Flinthook and Loot Rascals), or maybe it was just a particularly lousy year for them. There's not a whole lot that still appeals about the "three steps forward, two steps back" approach that this particular format offers, however. To the credit of the challenging balancing act that is TumbleSeed, it spends the first half of the game letting players acclimatize to everything it has to throw at you first through a basic controls and mechanics tutorial and then a tour of its various regions (the unstable frozen mountain, for instance, or the snake-ridden jungle mountain) before you're ready to play the "real" game, which is its randomized Adventure Mode.

Your goal, as a vulnerable seedling guided by an adjustable horizontal platform with its own spirit meter, is to reach the very top of a mountain and plant yourself to avert the catastrophe threatening all seed-kind. The player doesn't so much control the seed but the platform it's on, with separate controls for its far left and far right termini: you press up on the right to tilt the platform so the seed rolls down to the left, for example. It's an intuitive system that all the same requires a degree of nuance, which is why I probably recommend using a gamepad that maps these left and right movements to their appropriate analog sticks. As the seed travels up the mountain, it has to avoid holes in the ground and enemies that might attack it. To help, the player collects crystal shards and uses them to "purchase" boons from patches of fertile soil. These abilities can be utilitarian, like a new checkpoint in case you fall down a hole to collecting additional crystal shards if you're running out, to certain high-powered offensive and defensive skills that you learn on the way up in either special bonus areas or from the occasional vendor. You're always having to consider what might be valuable to you at that moment in time: should you continue to stockpile crystals for the harder times ahead? Should you plant another checkpoint flag, since it's been a while since the last one? If you have enough resources, how about building up your thorny offensive shield or working your way to a bonus hit point? The game moves at a leisurely clip and the player picks a route past the hazards in their way without any kind of time limit bearing down on them, affording them the chance to carefully ponder their next step - except when enemies are around, at which point you either need to hustle past or figure out the best way to dispose of them quickly.

I'll say the game's presentation does its darndest in putting you in a calm mood. From its soothing pastel palette to its adorable untextured vector graphics to its chill synth soundtrack, TumbleSeed is clearly the kind of game that doesn't so much demand but politely request a few moments of your downtime between whatever else you might be doing (seems like the Switch would be a good fit, given its portability and propensity for cuteness), and while it can be stressful to get that little seed up to where it needs to be the game does everything in its power to mitigate any frustration you might have. I've seen this before a few times, in particular with Grow Home - which, despite being mechanically different, also involved plants getting as high up as possible - and many casual games out there. It's a smart choice, because I probably would've bounced off the game a lot sooner if its aesthetic wasn't so assuaging.

If it wasn't clear: for a mechanically simple game, it sure isn't easy. Towards the later mountains in the game's protracted introductory period, the number of holes to avoid and enemy difficulty increase dramatically, and it's easy enough to panic and send yourself tumbling down into the abyss or into an enemy to lose one of your precious - and expensive to recover - hearts. Fortunately, the four starting mountains are short enough; it's the big "Adventure Mode" mountain - which randomizes the terrains and enemies you face, as well as being several magnitudes taller - where the game's real challenge lies. At that juncture I wasn't really prepared to keep bashing my head against such a challenge, especially given how easy it is to die and lose all that upward progress. It is once again the curse of the roguelike format, where you regularly gain nothing but lose everything (though, to be fair, this is true for almost any game developed more than 30 years ago). Like Loot Rascals, it's deserving enough of merit to warrant keeping the game around for the occasional run between larger games, but with several more 2017 titles to check out before this month is through I can't let myself go to seed just yet.

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