The apocalyptic event of the nuclear powerplant disaster killed and maimed thousands, and the area was declared deadly and was evacuated soon after. Pripyat near Chernobyl shows how resilient our planet can be when given a chance. Mankind loves to decimate natural beauty, and green and pleasant landscapes are turned grey overnight! It’s heartbreaking and shames humanity, yet nature sometimes fights back, and beauty and wonderment come from disaster. It’ll be a while before I stop thinking about these beautiful little dioramas which value hybridisation over rewilding. While puzzling can be a little obscure, and at times overly-elaborate, Cloud Gardens is more about tinkering and experimentation. Dating My Daughter Create to your heart’s content in creative mode.Ī verdant puzzle sandbox that evolves beyond your usual feel-good, meditative experience, and leaves plenty of questions to reflect on. What’s here is engaging, and turning up for the vibes is half the fun. But this doesn’t matter much – nature is a fickle thing, and not wholly understood, after all. Opaque and cloud-like – I’m still not entirely sure which seed is which, what the optimal conditions for growth are, and why sometimes my plants blossom and other times wither and die like the surrounding ruins. There are times when Cloud Garden’s mechanics are a little imprecise. The factory levels are also a ton of fun, as you continually wrap vegetation around a vast, knotted labyrinth of industrial pipes. There’s an entire section where you’re working within beautifully ornate Victorian-era greenhouses. Add to this the game’s vast sandbox mode where you can create your own levels from scratch and use any prop in the game (once you’ve unlocked them), and there’s a lot of great stuff to doodle with here. ![]() Out of almost a hundred levels, there are only a dozen or so that feel overly-elaborate. Also, you can only tell the joke about the garden gnome and rubber duck tea-party so many times. Like carefully-plotted puzzles, rather than the early game’s chaotic, junk-strewn wilderness. Ironically, some of these concrete playgrounds start to feel too much like a garden. Also, as maps become bigger and start involving multiple steps – buildings suddenly shifting upwards out of the clouds to join the rest of the level – things start to feel slightly contrived. I wasn’t a fan of the novelty Halloween graveyard section. Solve organic puzzles in a serene 3D space.Īs the levels progress there are a few missteps. It’s refreshing to see this strange symbiosis of artificial objects and plant-life, where an old worn-out boot can finally be seen as something valuable and put to use. In a world with no humans, the game’s railroads and factories are as natural a garden as any fabricated plot of grass or heap of compost. Cloud Gardens does a lot to resist these slightly woolly ideas, instead placing an emphasis on forms of salvage, hybridisation and repurposing rubbish. In games, as in other media, we’re increasingly seeing ecological concepts like “rewilding” explored – of bringing mother nature back to her true and original state. The gentle, wistful wind, the tinkering piano soundtrack, the silly crows that peck among the debris before being startled and flying off into the pastel-tinged sky. It’d be easy to gush about how relaxing and meditative a game Cloud Gardens is. You plop two bottles of beer down beside them. On one chair you sit a garden gnome, on the other, a rubber duck. In Cloud Gardens this is a set of plastic chairs that you place up on the balcony of a brutalist high-rise. Sometimes there’s even a bit of collaborative storytelling, reminiscent of how empty open-world games like Fallout lean into things like corpse jokes, where skeletons and paraphernalia are set-up in such a way as to imply a kind of narrative (before the bombs dropped). It’s an archaeological kind of play, of picking through civilisation’s trashy remnants. It presents scenarios without humans, but there’s still plenty of humanity here. Despite Cloud Gardens’ obsession with all this non-human stuff – with plants and objects – it never feels like a cold or soulless affair. Flowers burst from broken tarmac and vines shoot up to strangle the wreckage. ![]() When you plop these down, your plants bloom. In the highway maps this means old tires, traffic cones, bits of corrugated metal, rusted road signs and street lamps, sometimes even entire banged-up cars. You’re given a grab-bag of assorted clutter. After sowing your seeds you take your second action. ![]() Each of them grow differently, some work perfectly well on concrete ground, others wrap around objects and reach up vertically. There’s creeping ivy, propagating ferns, blossoms which hang and dangle, on top of larger plants and trees that stretch up towards the clouds.
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