Game Review - Grow Song of the Evertree

Game Review: Grow: Song of the Evertree by Prideful Sloth and published by 505 Games

Score: +3/-2

"Grow your own worlds and nurture a deep natural connection with everything they hold. See your actions change the world for better! Bring the Evertree back to life in this breathtaking world-crafting sandbox, with life management and adventure elements."

Grow: Song of the Evertree has a cozy / charming vibe and two core game modes: a fairly relaxing "gardening" mode, and a simple town management mode. If you don't like to do either of these for the sake of doing them, you will probably find the game predictable, boring, and repetitive.

+1 Simple but satisfying "gardening"

• Instead of choosing crops to garden, each World Seed you grow creates a miniature world where you basically have to do all the cleanup tasks including growing seeds, watering plants, cleaning up junk piles, and scrubbing animals.
• Unlike a static, predictable garden, it can feel highly satisfying to see a barren world transformed into something lush and abundant.
• There is a clear start and finish to each stage, and finishing a stage will cause the world to advance to the next stage the next day, culminating in the world fully blossoming into a final state whereupon you can assign NPCs to automatically gather random resources for you to collect every few days.
• +1 You can create basically unlimited worlds to garden over and over again, each time slightly different according to which Essences you use and you can use 3 to 5 out of 24 Essence types and in various amounts.
• +1 The visual range of these worlds is wide enough to give a fresh look every time. There's only room for a number of worlds so you have to eventually overwrite some to get a new world to do your gardening.
• Generally it is quite relaxing to do unless you are trying to cram in as much gardening as you can in each day. But nothing is really on a timer, so you would really just be unnecessarily stressing yourself out.

+1 Simple low-maintenance town management

• The other main part of the game is town management. There is no decay to the town so if you don't do anything it will just basically stay static and reliably produce the same amount of currency each day. Or you can just ignore it and focus on other parts of the game.
• -1 Town management is actually too easy and fast.
• Just from gardening you get piles of drops including decorations needed to upgrade various buildings. You basically don't need to engage in other game systems.
• You need to reach 100% Happiness to advance the story to the next stage, but it is actually very easy to do this. Even during a late-game district, you need only a handful of residents, a bunch of decorations, and to do a few quests for the residents. Each town has a checklist of targets you can try to reach but you don't need to do even half of them.
• Because this advances so quickly, you can end up zooming through the game ignoring a lot of the mechanics like the shops and the "festival days".
• +0 There is actually deeper levels of micromanagement/optimization if you pursue it, with such things as tweaking the job choices and stats of residents and juggling the building limits. For players who don't like the Town Management aspect of the game, none of this is actually necessary as the requirements to advance the story are actually extremely easy to attain.

-1 Predictable stories

• As you reach 100% happiness in each town you get to unlock another story reveal, but really it is so predictable from the start of the game what the overall story will be and there are no plot twists.
• There are some "romance" storylines with special characters that show up but these are so token they are a waste of time. And if you lock in a romance too early, it seems that you can end up cutting short the other storylines even before you are presented with a romance choice.

-0 Trivial puzzles and platforming, though this is obviously meant to be a "cozy" relaxed game so this is probably intentional. Unfortunately, the rewards are commensurately trivial.

-0 Unbalanced time system

• Although each day has limited time, you can go to zones where time does not tick and just farm resources endlessly. For example, you can go to Where-Ever, the world of the Everkin, where it is perpetually daylight and just fish and catch bugs forever.
• But since you already get so many resources in other ways, this isn't really game-breaking at all.

-0 Seemingly useless systems

• For example, there are materials that might drop in rarities like green Uncommon or blue Rare. But it is unclear when this actually matters.

-0 Still buggy after three years but not seriously

• The main bug is in the early game achievement collection where sometimes collecting and achievement will cause the game to lock with no inputs accepted. You have to force-close the game and reload to try again.
• Another irritating bug is the NPC location function. You can click on an NPC to inspect their location, but often they are not actually there and somewhere else instead.
• Another minor bug was insects in the game zooming literally into objects and inaccessible. But since there are so many insects to catch, this is not really an issue.