Winds & Leaves

Not pollen your leg, it’s good

From small seeds big ideas sprout. Set against PSVR’s library of skilled snipers and OTT Hollywood shootouts, a game that revolves around planting seeds and watching trees grow manages to overshadow many of the headset’s more commonplace experiences.

As ‘The Gardener’ you must heal your world and regrow its fauna and flora. To accomplish this you walk around the colourful biomes on stilts that enable you to vary your speed and rise into the treetops to pick fruit – the seeds to grow more trees.

The simple premise belies some complexity, mostly in the control setup. You walk by wafting the Move controllers like imaginary ski poles, and rise by pulling upwards.1 You need to manually grab at your digging tool and pick seeds from a rollout wallet. Nothing is overtly explained, either. The world contains murals that tease the game’s rules.2 Seeds grow trees, and trees cure the ground, enabling you to explore further. Different seeds can only grow in specific soil, and combining seeds creates new species – there’s a puzzle quality to the world design that gets more complex the further you go.

The grow-and-go loop may be simple but there’s enough challenge to keep you thinking. The game’s a looker, too. The clean, stylised visuals deliver a deep sense of satisfaction as a barren desert floods with colourful trees – the reds, greens, and blues of your endeavours encouraging you to keep going, to keep planting more. It’s a visual treetment that works. To backpetal slightly, there are some bugs, but nothing the dev won’t swat away in time.

FOOTNOTES 1 Reaching the treetops can be buggy as you need to be standing in exactly the right invisible spot to make it work. 2 Nothing in the game is overtly explained; instead you need to decipher the clues left behind by your ancestors. Though we all understand how seeds work, at a basic level, right?