IF Comp Review: Growbotics

[healyg]

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Cha Holland's Growbotics. (I refuse to type it in all-caps on principle.)

Growbotics is, essentially, a toy-game parody with a bit of plot mixed in. In it you're the recipient of the latest new thing in creation technology, Growbotics! The basic gameplay is combining essences, like Vision or Sensation, to take just two examples, into either more complicated essences or a new shiny object, depending on the game mode. It's very satisfying to combine stuff to get more stuff (special thanks to the sound design here), although it's frustrating when you keep getting the buzzer again and again.



The game design of Growbotics is fun and all, but unfortunately it seems to be trying to say something and I can't see what. There's an obvious parody of over-promising art apps, creation technology, and the like (the game is really good at making fun of the overblown writing style these products tend to use), but it doesn't get much further than point-and-laugh-at-the-thing, satire-wise. There's potential in the purely cosmetic choices of the beginning, and I like how the manual, which makes it easier for you to create things, also prunes some of your possibilities away, but the game seems divided by what exactly it wants to say. Both the "winning" and "losing" endings are tongue-in-cheek portrayals of opposite (and undesirable?) extremes, but the game never achieves synthesis between them. Maybe it would have helped if the game took itself a bit more seriously, or maybe art and creation is just a tricky subject for any artist to tackle.

Conclusion: Growbotics is a joy as a toy, but as an artistic statement it's kind of iffy.