![]() Also, as maps become bigger and start involving multiple steps – buildings suddenly shifting upwards out of the clouds to join the rest of the level – things start to feel slightly contrived. I wasn’t a fan of the novelty Halloween graveyard section. It’s refreshing to see this strange symbiosis of artificial objects and plant-life, where an old worn-out boot can finally be seen as something valuable and put to use.Īs the levels progress there are a few missteps. In a world with no humans, the game’s railroads and factories are as natural a garden as any fabricated plot of grass or heap of compost. Cloud Gardens does a lot to resist these slightly woolly ideas, instead placing an emphasis on forms of salvage, hybridisation and repurposing rubbish. In games, as in other media, we’re increasingly seeing ecological concepts like “rewilding” explored – of bringing mother nature back to her true and original state. The gentle, wistful wind, the tinkering piano soundtrack, the silly crows that peck among the debris before being startled and flying off into the pastel-tinged sky. It’d be easy to gush about how relaxing and meditative a game Cloud Gardens is. You plop two bottles of beer down beside them. On one chair you sit a garden gnome, on the other, a rubber duck. In Cloud Gardens this is a set of plastic chairs that you place up on the balcony of a brutalist high-rise. Sometimes there’s even a bit of collaborative storytelling, reminiscent of how empty open-world games like Fallout lean into things like corpse jokes, where skeletons and paraphernalia are set-up in such a way as to imply a kind of narrative (before the bombs dropped). It’s an archaeological kind of play, of picking through civilisation’s trashy remnants. It presents scenarios without humans, but there’s still plenty of humanity here. Flowers burst from broken tarmac and vines shoot up to strangle the wreckage.ĭespite Cloud Gardens’ obsession with all this non-human stuff – with plants and objects – it never feels like a cold or soulless affair. When you plop these down, your plants bloom. In the highway maps this means old tires, traffic cones, bits of corrugated metal, rusted road signs and street lamps, sometimes even entire banged-up cars. You’re given a grab-bag of assorted clutter. Credit: Thomas van den BergĪfter sowing your seeds you take your second action. Each of them grow differently, some work perfectly well on concrete ground, others wrap around objects and reach up vertically.Ĭloud Gardens. There’s creeping ivy, propagating ferns, blossoms which hang and dangle, on top of larger plants and trees that stretch up towards the clouds. The first action is planting seeds – you flick through a beautiful set of cards and choose from a selection of plant types. You take two actions, one after the other. ![]() The focus here is all on these ruined slices of urban life that float nebulously in the ether, and upon which you’re let loose to play and tinker. This is Cloud Gardens – a post-apocalypse, minus humans. ![]()
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