LEAF IT OUT
Make like a tree and get out in HER TREES
Before survival games came along and asked us to fill our pockets with the entire contents of a forest, adventure games were the most item-hungry genre around. But there’s value in stripping it back to just the mouse cursor and some puzzling things, as Myst proved. That trend continues in adventure game Her Trees.
There are no keys or other items to collect. Instead, your inventory is letters of the alphabet – A to I – which you have to type in as the solution to every puzzle. Finding these passcodes is the tricky and quite ingenious bit, as clues are hidden in every orifice, in twisty bones or bits of twig, in empty pint glasses or torn-up missives. Sometimes the letters themselves are hidden, waiting to be revealed as you puzzle around, or sometimes clues take the form of diagrams that you can use as a guide to the alphabet grid in the corner of the screen.
You discover these clues not by pulling levers or pressing buttons or twisting dials, but by dragging items around with the mouse, experimenting by piling this thing on that thing or moving this die by that die to form a pattern. The information is all there, you just need to piece it together, to arrange the constituent parts so they’re just so.
The puzzles are clever, and all stuffed in one small and elegant room-escape style environment. You’ll solve tough little puzzles as you turn to every corner of the room, filling in a tree and revealing an ending that is brief and baffling. Her Trees has a soothing atmosphere and lightly macabre puzzling making it a great place to linger. 79