Botanicula

Botanicula is visually very pleasing. So much so, that you can almost call it romantic. The overall story is about a few seeds, a mushroom and a branch on a mission endangered by evil black spiders. The visuals add to the storytelling by bring you along various interesting places and organisms. The gameplay resolves around puzzles and finding a few items, and it isn’t good. You might say that the puzzles are all unique. You start with a few visual clues and see an imaginative egg surprise unfold thereafter. This is uniqueness in the wrong way. Often what really happens is that the unforeseen destroys any puzzle logic. There is no mechanic that the game teaches. It has no difficulty curve such as puzzles with increasing complex based on some game logic. It offers no challenge or puzzle satisfaction, except persistence to move towards the end. For example, in one puzzle the branch can grow to five times its size to cross a cavity. This “growth” cannot be used and isn’t repeated in any of the other puzzles. It feels cheap and cheated. Something like a bad b-movie about penguins that escape through the intervention of an alien artifact causing the penguin-eating polar bear to teleport to the Sahara desert. Or more true to Botanicula, you enter a hole in a tree and the game tells you that it wasn’t the solution by flying you back from the other side of the screen holding the legs of a gigantic insect. Imaginative: yes, game: no.

So colourful and tender you'll stop and remember that sense of wonder you had as a child and slowly lost to cynicism and daily struggles. A beautiful dream in digital form.

I know this game gets a lot of love, but personally I don't see it. The art style is unattractive, there's no characters or story to speak of, and the puzzles flick from "trivial" to "WTF" with no middle ground. With so many genuinely excellent point-and-clicks in the world it's hard to see what would make someone play Botanicula.

Let me begin with an important point: This is not an adventure game in the classical sense, but clearly emphasizes exploration and experimentation instead of solving puzzles, and does this very well! To a seasoned adventure game player, however, Botanicula will be awfully linear, devoid of tough nuts to crack, puzzle-wise, and sorely lacking in complexity overall, leading to a playthrough time of a few hours at best. The story is conceptually well-understood: Black, evil entity threatens to destroy home, band of heroes assembles to save everyone. You will not encounter any written or spoken dialog, and the scarce communication between characters is handled by short animations. Your inventory rarely has to handle more than one (yes, one) item at a time, and most of the time you're hunting for hotspots to find out what you are able to interact with. All this would make Botanicula a rather uninteresting adventure game, but it's merit lies in the wonderfully different execution! The art style is consistent, colorful and vibrant throughout. This game manages to immediately suck you into a downright strange and cute world, underlined with matching music and sound effects. Everything on screen moves, sways in unseen winds, blinks, bounces, beeps and bobbles, even more so when you're moving over and clicking things. Once you get over the nagging feeling that you're basically playing with a picture book, it's easy to enjoy just clicking on things and watching them react, sometimes in a hilariously silly manner, and all the while progressing with the story. The game does not penalize mistakes, but rather rewards curiosity and experimentation; A necessity for most of the "puzzles" in the game, and to collect all 123 "cards" of the wondrous things you encounter. It is *fun* to explore the weird world the protagonists are trying to save, and even manages to evoke the elusive "just one more screen" feeling, to see what else the game designers can come up with. Overall, if you are able to simply enjoy exploring, looking at and listening to an adorably weird world, Botanicula will deliver, particularly to children and everyone looking for less competitive, relaxing gameplay.

I bought it in pre-order, but I finished it just recently. It is a wonderful game with beautiful music, climatic graphics and very good playability and - as it always is with Amanita games - one not-so-obvious puzzle. I highly recommend it, it is a lot of greatly enjoyable entertainment, especially on a 1080p screen with a good sound system. Kudos to amanita for new gameplay ideas: multiple character choices for solving puzzles, collecting organisms living in the tree, lots of hidden pranks too. Be sure to visit locations several times. Experiment with the surroundings. Don't just point and click as if ADHD was incurable. This game is also wonderful for the kids. Got kids? Buy the game! No better way and pretext to tell your kids about ecology, harmony, balance and flourishment of live within environments. Yet 4 stars, why? After finishing it I missed something, a feeling of having encountered something breathtaking, something pure in perfection, a feeling present after finishing Samorost 2 or Machinarium. That is why 4/5, sure it is unfair, I went through different games and both 4 and 5 stars are unfair here in my opinion. The games is great alright, it is just that I have expected even more perfection than it offered, because I know Amanita can provide it. It a wonderful game, buy it without hesitation. Show it to your friends. This Czech studio achieve artism beyond any other contemporary game producer. Stop reading, buy the game now!