Botanicula
An achingly adorable little adventure that really grows on you
£2.99 Developer Amanita Design, amanita-design.net
Works with iPad Version 1.0.2 Age 9+
The last iOS adventure game from Amanita Design was the lovely Machinarium, starring a sweet robot in a beautiful handdrawn, robot-run world. It was fun and adorable, but compared to Botanicula, it might as well have been a gritty drama.
Botanicula takes place in the world of plants, and stars a group of flora friends. When nasty creatures start draining the life out of plants, they set out to escape, but this isn’t really about the plot. Each part of the game is filled with increasingly surreal puzzles and gently maze-like environments to explore, which vary from tree branches to root systems to villages inhabited by sentient chestnuts. To complete an area, you might have to rescue chestnut babies, collect keys or find chickens to power… well, we wouldn’t want to spoil the moment. Finding these things might mean outsmarting a territorial scorpion, directing water jets to make plants grow, beating a chestnut at volleyball or bouncing off raspberry-like bugs.
It’s all totally mad, and brilliant for it, especially with the wonderful sound design and voices that have gone into every creature. There’s a downside to bizarreness, though, which is it can be very difficult at times. Some puzzles are solved just by poking around (though even then you can be caught out by not swiping on something in exactly the way it wants), but some are simply too hard to divine.
This isn’t a problem very often, but it does mean kids might need a bit of help with a game that’s otherwise largely as perfect for them as it is for adults – utterly charming, endlessly inventive, silly and refreshing. Yes, it’s occasionally a tad frustrating, but it’s a wonderful thing anyway. Matt Bolton A strange, lovely, light adventure for your iPad. It’s occasionally opaque, but absolutely worth buying.
Ludicrously sweet
Some great puzzles
Looks beautiful
Can be very opaque