These hinge on interactions that don't really have quite enough internal logic to them, such as opening a jack-in-the-box a certain number of times to reveal a secret item, or feeding coins into a slot machine in order to - of course! - unleash a flood. "Towards the end of the game, it feels a bit like you're exploring the inside of somebody's uterus."Īlongside all this, there's a sprinkling of challenges that can initially seem completely random. On the surface, at least, it's not particularly inspiring. Woven into these treasure hunts, you'll find plenty of fetch-quests and substitution puzzles, along with mazes, programming variants, and the odd rhythm action sequence. Never thought a group of bugs might need door keys? Think again: these guys are after a handful of them, just like they're in the market for plenty of chickens to power machinery, and they'll even drop everything to round up a troop of kidnapped chestnut babies when the scenario depends upon it. For a game so riddled with imaginative whimsy, the structure of the challenges is relentlessly formulaic, with each chapter tasking you with collecting a different selection of items in order to open up the route to the next bit of the world. None of this set-up is quite as important as it sounds, mind, because Botanicula's puzzles are its least interesting element. If you're not a fan of mandibles, this probably won't be the game for you. That's the kind of gang you've been put in charge of. There's a toadstool, for example, who can bat things around with her bouncy head, and there's a spry little branch that can occasionally send out roving twiglets in order to scoop items out of holes and wells. To the extent that Botanicula actually has traditional puzzles, it's your five heroes - who thankfully move as a single group - that often end up playing the role of your tools. It seems there's a dark force of corruption spreading across this natural paradise, and after a few lavishly pretty and endearingly skippable cut-scenes, you're off to save the day, in the form of a tiny rabble of unlikely heroes. I think that's what happens, anyway it's all a bit vague. One of those spiders is responsible for what little narrative the game possesses, after it pinches a crucial seed from the huge home tree that provides Botanicula's setting. Here, the previous game's rusting scrap metal landscape is replaced with its exact opposite - a muddle of moss and twigs and creaking bioluminescent branches - while the cast of malfunctioning droids has been swapped out in favour of a gloopy selection of grubs, beetles, snails and spiders. Machinarium was a lovely, lonely adventure starring the world's most huggable robots (second-most huggable if you've seen Silent Running, obv.), and while Botanicula's not a sequel by any means, it feels like a sort of companion piece. Turn up with a bit of a rambly micro-safari in mind, however, and you'll probably be in a state of complete rapture from the word go.īotanicula's the latest game from Amanita Design, the Czech studio that previously gave us Machinarium, amongst other treats. Come here looking for the puzzles, for instance, and you may find yourself feeling quietly disappointed. What kind of difference can that single word make? Plenty, actually. Read the small print carefully, OK? Botanicula sells itself as a point-and-click exploration game as opposed to a point and click adventure game.
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