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It’s sadly superficial, but it still has some wonder about it. The visual art and sound and music, though, are joyful and capture the imagination. The writing is often baldly functional, getting right to the point of what item is needed without faffing around with character and conversation. You then insert some “light pollen” into that holoprism and… we suppose Bob’s your uncle?īut if there’s a balance to be struck between puzzles, items, world-building, and story, Growbot knows where it’s putting the emphasis: a primary, music-based puzzle type and a world brought to life almost entirely by the game’s art. For instance, an early puzzle has you put some jam into a teleporter so that a “holoprism” is sent back out of it. This isn’t helped by the fact that many of Growbot’s puzzles involve bringing together made-up items, defined entirely by their interaction. In theory that’s fine, but in practice it contributes to the sense that you’re just clicking to turn the page of a story with the “turn page” button in a different location on each screen. Verbs are perhaps a relic of those old post- Zork hangover days now, and Growbot is another game where you just click away, and “do the thing with the thing” is the only verb you have. Its little innovations are the clear division of your inventory into “keepables” and “consumables” – which gives some structure to help minimise the try-everything-with everything moments – and a colour-coded cursor that neatly shows whether something’s interactive or whether the game is busy for the moment. Growbot does all the basics, following the long-established routine of cursor-pointing, inventory cataloguing, and dialogue options. The world in question is a robo-horticulturalist crystal space asteroid sort of jam, with a little scuttler called Nara being the chosen hero, saving the universe despite the uncertainties of youth

The loop is “solve puzzles, unlock more puzzles”, with the added pay-off of the explorable world growing as you do so. Growbot is a good old point-n-clicker in the classic style: screen-sized scenes to be pixel hunted, each one providing some combination of puzzles, items for solving puzzles, world-building, and story progression.