Steam Cleaning Part 3: Grow Home

Grow Home is a lovely game that perfectly balances frustration and progress. It's about a red anthropomorphic robot who has an uncanny ability to climb, and who grows a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-style beanstalk from sea level to space, where its trusty spaceship is waiting. To grow the space stalk, the player has to plug vines that the robot (B.U.D.) rides like the dragon dog from Never Ending Story into green energy islands that float in the air. As the stalk gets successively further from the ground, the tension grows, too, because falls can hinder your progress, and your robot can even be shattered into itsy-bitsy pieces by a long fall.

The game has a surreal, trippy style, from B.U.D.'s unconnected limbs, to the bizarre plants growing in the alien world, to the wry text messages the spaceship's computer sends when you plummet like an adorable red meteor. It's rendered in bright colors and really has a fun, children's-imagination feeling. This includes the way B.U.D. moves: when climbing and especially when running, he has the drunken not-quite-falling-over-but-almost run of a toddler, and his big eyes really give him a childlike appearance. This all could be taking place inside the mind of a kid playing in the yard, climbing a tree and pretending it was a stalk to space.

To climb, you use the triggers on your game pad to operate the suction on either of B.U.D.'s hands. The game provides a reticule for each hand, and so you can climb hand over hand up anything by alternating hands. It's fun to climb, and having the manual control of each hand actually creates a physical correspondence between the effort of B.U.D. and the physical effort - however minor - on the part of the player. B.U.D.'s controls can become frustrating now and then, when you're trying to make a difficult maneuver, or on a small platform, when he's as likely to trip over his own feet and send you tumbling over the edge as he is to stubbornly refuse to move for a second before taking off at a run. Precision moves just aren't really possible. Most of the time, they aren't necessary, but when they were, especially when far from the last checkpoint, it lead to me putting the controller down and ending my play session for the day.

The reason that this doesn't just become impossibly frustrating is that the game makers have cleverly tuned the game to keep giving you second chances, and speeding your progress. The small amount of air control the player has when falling allows you to turn a disastrous missed handhold into a small setback. The Teleporters spread throughout the game keep you from having to replay sections unnecessarily, and the weird plants that grow on the sky islands around the stalk allow you to float in the air or glide rather than plummet. The plants and leaves that grow on the stalk itself act as catapults and trampolines, again speeding the B.U.D.'s ascent and keeping the sometimes-tense-sometimes-tedious climbing from being the player's only way up the stalk.

The thing that made Grow Home feel so rewarding to play was its open-ended game play. The game provides a wide variety of options - if you wanted to, you could avoid using the other plants, and climb only using your hands. Or, you can grow a ladder of vines that lead wherever you want to go. Or, you could combine all of these approaches. Because the game world itself can be shaped by your actions, it really is up to the player to create solutions and think creatively, rather than being required to find the solution the game makers want you to use. Similar to games like Terraria, the freedom to solve problems and make your strategies a reality is fun.

I'd recommend this game to anyone, and particularly to people who are looking to get their kids (older kids like 8- or 9-year-olds) into games, since this has a fun feeling, enough challenge for an older kid, but nothing that could be considered inappropriate for younger audiences.