TIME EXTEND
Grow Home
How a twisting fairytale beanstalk freed Ubisoft from its least playful impulses
By Christian Donlan
Developer/publisher
Ubisoft (Ubisoft Reflections) Format PC, PS4 Release 2015
Should you decide to be unfairly reductive about Ubisoft’s general approach to game design, you might argue that the publisher prefers to make large, busy games in which interaction is defined by convenience and work. Games such as Assassin’s Creed can give you what amounts to a full-time job, but they at least make that job as easy to carry out as possible, with clear icons scattered on the map and tools that are neatly fit for purpose.
Yet now and then Ubisoft will do something different. It will allow a studio such as Newcastle’s Reflections to make something small and weird and yet still undeniably Ubisoft-adjacent. This means Ubisoft occasionally produces games such as Grow Home – and in Grow Home something magical happens. The convenience is there in everything you do, but the work fails to materialise. You have objectives and missions and even collectables to hunt down, but everything is governed by a sense of open-ended play and, more than anything, by possibility. This is a word we will return to later.
Convenience might initially seem like a strange way to think about Grow Home, which, during its first few minutes, can seem wilfully, comically awkward. The game casts you as a tiny red robot named BUD, whose ship has dropped him off on an alien planet. And it’s done this quite literally: BUD has fallen out of the ship and plummeted through the sky to land on a sandy beach, surrounded by calm blue waters. Your job in the game is to climb: to navigate rocks, mountains and eventually asteroids as you make your way back to the orbiting ship, hopefully having collected elements of the local fauna that will be of help back on your world.