I am a diorama-y sort of person so at first I found Cloud Gardens' focus on win conditions was rather hemming me in.īut then I realised that, actually, this is plants. In a recent Edge preview, the developer Thomas van den Berg admitted that when he saw Townscaper he thought "Oh my god, I didn't know you could get away with that." Pure play and no objective. It's fascinating to see Cloud Gardens battle itself over how much of a game it wants to be. It's not just the Monstera that keeps me playing. But that's why you have early access right? In Cloud Gardens they just sort of appear - at least I think they do. One of the joys of a real Monstera is that the leaves arrive rolled up, like treasure maps or messages passed at the opera, and then gently unfurl as the new leaf moves between different styles of plastic before hitting the heavy wax-paper loveliness of the mature Monstera foliage. Pick my spot a bit better, though, and the shoots erupt with those magical canopies spreading outwards. I plant a seed in the wrong place and nothing happens. It helps that the Monsteras in Cloud Gardens have all the worldly charisma of the real-world Monstera. These plants need a good moss pole if you're going to try them in your house, and you should because, so long as you get a nice bit of (indirect?) sunlight, they will do you proud. They're beauties - right from the tropical forests where those holes, I have been told, allow light to travel into the depths and the lower branches. Monsteras are those plants with the wide leaves with holes in them. There is something about toxic clouds of grit drifting through the gappy leaves of a good Monstera that reminds me that I was born in the late 'seventies and lived my formative years to the sound of (Don't Fear) The Reaper coming from the 8-track of my mum's Mazda. It's the office plant from the days in which everyone in the office smoked. (Using phrases like 'par excellence' is the sort of Abigail's Party stuff that goes down whenever Monsteras are invoked do you like Demis Roussos?) Oh no. This is not just the office plant par excellence. The 'Sorry, the Vice President is out shopping for water beds right now can I put you on hold' plant. But then I unlocked a new kind of plant to grow - my third or maybe fourth. I was enjoying this for a few levels and having one of those dreamy, ruminative days that a diorama game can hand you. The aim is to reach a certain level of coverage, and you can encourage plants to grow further by chucking in extra items that you're given - street signs, a stack of tyres, a shopping trolley perhaps, or a couple of empty bottles. Then you apply little nubbins of plants to the diorama and watch them grow. You start each level with a floating chunk of real estate - a tumbledown road or the skeletal rig for urban signage. But there's something else here that I love, so I will gush briefly and incoherently instead.
It's a conversation I don't really want to butt in on here, because I've played the game and had the privilege of thinking my own way through it, and I shouldn't rob anyone of that. Cloud Gardens seeks to start a dialogue between game and player about nature and the built environment.
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