“Wheeee!” “Errrrk!” “Ahhhh!”
These are some of the noises elicited by Grow Home, last year’s Ubisoft Reflections’ side project-turned-acclaimed wobbly heart-melter. One noise you’re unlikely to have made is “I am deeply happy to have efficiently and quickly reached the end of this starry adventure and will now return to the drab vicissitudes of life”.
Grow Home was a game technically about Pixar-y robot, BUD, climbing an alien beanstalk to get back to your spaceship mum - but it was about making death-defying climbs up impossibly steep cliff faces to reach an island that looked like it had a nice mushroom on it. Or rodeo-ing a space-vine to place you above a donut-shaped island and BASE jumping through its island-y guts to find a secret cave. Or kicking a sheep from 10,000 feet above sea level into that self-same sea. The fun was in spending time not getting to the end.
Its recently announced sequel Grow Up, thankfully, is a game all about the latter. “BUD’s got this amazing freedom of movement,” explains producer Pete Young, “but we'd created an open and interesting experience that’s fundamentally still a vertical tunnel. So we thought, 'right, let's build a game with a world that really fits with and opens up on the character’.”
Grow Up takes Grow Home’s simple conceit and blasts it across the breadth of a full planet (hand-crafted by just two artists), complete with four separate biomes, each with its own take on the first game’s Star Plant, not to mention the its trademark floating islands and gorgeous low-poly vistas.
Your final goal might still be to stretch those controllable plants out of the atmosphere, this time to reach the world’s moon, but there’s far more to be done beforehand. After a catastrophic accident during a game of digital Tic-Tac-Toe, BUD’s transport/parent, MOM, is blown to pieces and scattered across the uncharted, non-violent world below, and it’s your job to find them and put her back together.
It leads to an interesting problem for Ubisoft Reflections’ ten-person team - BUD’s sticky hands and procedural movement allow him to scale any obstacle with enough effort, meaning collecting those parts is as simple as spending time getting to where they are. The solution, from the short section I’ve played, seems not to be artificially adding impossible-to-pass walls, but just to make it much more fun to complete your quest using other means.
BUD’s now able to extend gliding wings, turn into an unexpectedly Sonic-like boosting ball and, most gratifyingly, use the world he’s stranded on to his advantage. The Floradex is a new equipment menu-cum-sticker album that lets BUD catalogue any alien species of plant he comes across, subsequently letting him replant it anywhere else.
With every plant having unique properties - rangy stalks that act like a trebuchet, or bloated orchids that blast off like fireworks when touched - it adds nuance to Grow Home’s massively satisfying world-building element, letting you plant fields of interactive vegetation, whether that’s to solve getting to an out-of-the-way outcrop, or just to see what happens.
It’s a remarkably hands-off approach to design, one that’ll inevitably lead to players finding totally different ways to approach the game’s challenges - not even out of Just Cause-y freeform experimentation, but simple practicality. It’s a statement of intent borne out neatly by Young realising for the first time - as we’re playing this feature-complete build - that with enough upgrades and time, players could simply glide-and-jetpack BUD to the moon. He doesn’t seem to care: “It’s just a world we’ve left with no boundaries. That was the design intention from the start.”
It remains to be seen whether the number of abilities can match the scale of expansion here - truly “free” games so often feel a little empty after a while - but that world itself could well be enough to hold the attention. Its powder paint palette and absurdly curved horizon bring to mind Mario Galaxy (that’s no coincidence - it’s Young’s favourite game), and just a brief stint across its surface reveals massive hidden cave systems, slightly creepy sheep-butterfly hybrids and tiny islands dotted across the game’s insta-death ocean. The game’s designers keep laughing as players find new things, another tiny detail - you get the sense they love the place.
And that’s very much the point. Young makes clear that we’re not returning to the story of BUD because Ubisoft now wants to treat Grow like a mini-franchise. Reflections has multiple prototypes for brand new experimental games on the go, but the team simply wasn’t done with their little climbing robot - Grow Up might be the point at which they are:
“For us, our team's all about trying something new. So right now I'm interested in us exploring areas that are different again, trying to surprise players with something new. Whether we see B.U.D. again in a future title, that'd be nice, but it needs to be feel new. The team is definitely not about just churning out another version of the same product.”
It’s both refreshing to hear from a developer within a AAA monolith like Ubisoft, and a mission statement that applies nicely to Grow Up - it might be the same set-up, but the game feels new indeed.
Grow Up will be released on August 16 for PS4, with Xbox One and PC versions also scheduled for some point in August.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he's so ready to endlessly crash BUD into the sides of mountains again. Follow him on Twitter.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire