PixlBit

I find reviewing The Undergarden to be a difficult prospect; it’s another game added to the growing catalogue of independently published games focusing more on the presentation and visual design of the world rather than story or character development. While the other games in this genre, Braid or Limbo for example, try to throw in some complex puzzle interaction The Undergarden instead goes a different route, marketing itself as a “Zen Game”.

Not quite sure what that meant, I downloaded the game and started it up. Maybe fifteen minutes later, I understood. With nothing to do besides focusing on pollinating plants and solving simple puzzles, I had achieved gaming without active thought.

The Undergarden’s premise is straight forward from a mechanics angle. You start the game with your character, some sort of purple… thing… that looks like something out of a preschooler’s educational show. Living under the sea, you travel among fifteen levels, collecting pollen and using it to cause various bio-luminescent plants to bloom. When you cause all the plants around a tree to bloom, that tree will generate various kinds of fruit. Each piece of fruit has a unique property (e.g. floats, sinks, explodes, generates electricity) that is used to bypass an obstacle blocking your progress. Unfortunately, each obstacle you encounter is incredibly simple to solve, a pressure plate on the ceiling means you need the floaty fruit, floor gets the sinkers.

The controls in the game alternate between decently precise when you are not carrying any of the various fruits, to unresponsive when carrying a few, to downright impossible when burdened with more than four or five.

Obviously though, the focus of the game isn’t on the mechanics so much as the environment that you are immersed in, and in that regard The Undergarden does a solid job. The visuals are startlingly beautiful, as every level you find yourself in a dull lifeless cave system that springs into glowing plant life as you spread the pollen.

The soundtrack is a light trance inducing track that will actually change as you encounter other creatures known as musicians. Carrying one with you will actually cause their instruments noise to mix in with your soundtrack and cause any bloomed plants you encounter to rebloom with a new color, if you are willing to carry multiple musicians you can get quite the symphony going. I was actually very impressed with the execution of this area as it made me curious to just swim around and see where the tracks led.

Putting aside any desire to explore psychology or the essence of Zen, that is truly all there is to this game. I feel almost as if it should have been marketed as more of a children’s game, given its simple concepts and ease of use. Adults are left with a short game that will ultimately leave you questioning why you played it in the first place when there seems to be no stated goal or true ending.

Editor's Note: The score was updated from 2.5 to 3 Stars due to an error made at time of posting.