A little disappointed...

[Drift]

I loved Grow Home, one of my all time favourites. I loved growing the plant, and adding more to my safety net and basically creating this massive structure to help me get around.

The scale of Grow Up is awesome. But at the same time, I've played for 3 hours, and I now have the rolling ability, as well as infinite parachute, a glider, and a bunch of jetpack. As soon as I got the glider, I was no longer even using the plant, it seemed unnecessary. Now I also have the booster on the glider. Now everything seems irrelevent... I can jsut fly directly to any objective I want.

Am I missing something, or have I just effectivly broken the game? : /

[Curious Duck]

The abilities you unlock can be used in different ways.

Such as people who want to play using plants/jetpack can do so. Others can use the glider.

It is meant to be easy once you gain so many unlocks.

[Drift]

In three hours! :<

[XBL Laberbacke]

There are games that are dragged out for too long and then there's short and to the point.

[Sleeprocket]

Yeah I think you definitely have a point

[Beat]

As soon as the glider gets a jet engine you can do the rest of the objectives in the game in no time flat, skipping everything. This game is even shorter than Grow Home if you actually use what you've been given, especially as there's no second quest when you finish akin to the starseed mission in Grow Home

[vitoroba]

Yeah, just started this game and I completely agree.

In Grow Home I felt like the game had 3 phases: the growing the plant A LOT phase, climbing and making safety nets, being punished for falling and having fun with all that; the gliding phase, after you got the good glider and a good few teleporters and you would be using it all the time and having a lot of fun, searching for stuff left behind with speed and all that, all the while still being punished for mistakes; the infinite jet pack phase, in the late game, where you felt very rewarded for all the trouble you went through to get all the crystals and could fly freely and feel super badass doing it.

I say it felt like 3 different phases to me because they all had breakpoints where my playstyle changed drastically, yet all of them took a few hours to play through and were fun in their own way. It was one of the best indie experiences in gaming for me, ever.

But 2 hours in Grow Up and traversing the world is so easy and fast that growing the starplant does feel like a hassle. There wasn't adventure and reward, the joy of exploration and slow, rewarding traversal. Even with a world so much bigger, it all feels a lot less important and glorious.

And honestly, saying that you have the upgrades but are free to use them and play however you want is no excuse. That is just not how game design works.

All that is not to say that I'm not enjoying the game, because I am and will probably 100% it like I did with the first, and like it a lot. But it will probably not be nearly as memorable a experience as it was when I first played Grow Home.

[Tzvi]

come to think of it the main star plant in the first game did feel a lot bigger taking hours to grow
i remember climbing it carefully one grab at a time always being in awe about how high i currently am. the star plant was the heart of the game


in this game its a side thing that only needs a few branches to grow and complete
you could even reach the top without growing them all just by using various seeds

in the first game it was just you and spaceship up in space and the star plant as your only means of reaching it



it was a better experience
the star plant was actually its own colossal structure
and that island with the hole in it with the waterfall with the plant going through


i think its a better game

still i enjoy the fact you can orbit the whole planet in this game and glide boost around the place

[6_Demon_bag]

This game needs a hard mode. Like you say, once you get most of the upgrades the challenge becomes trivial. Saying that, I am still enjoying collecting all the crystals but the P.O.D challenges can be cheesed with over-use of the jet powered glider.

[Jakkauli]

Yeah, I also felt like I got the Glider boost ability too early on. It made the rest of the game so effortless that climbing became irrelevant. Challenges quickly became chores instead of actual challenges because of that, too.

It should've been one of the last unlocks IMO.

[Specific Beef]

I went back and replayed Grow Home, and it's certainly a different experience. This is the weird thing about the people who are a little disappointed in Grow Up: some say it hasn't changed enough (in which case, they should go back and test that theory!), some say it's changed too much.

The thing is, a Grow Home II that would be as faithful to your favourite aspects? I'm not sure why that game needs to exist, when you can just go back and play Grow Home again. It was a fantastic game idea, and a very pure one that's difficult to revisit without repeating it. If you want the restrictions of Grow Home with Grow Up's full planet, well, I can imagine that feeling like a hell of a chore if I seeded one starplant with the intensive work of Grow Home's style and then had to traipse over to the next one and do it again. I think they did the right thing by making the starplant feeding into a quicker, less centralised thing.

Plus, Grow Home is without doubt shorter and there's no real way for the player to make it longer, whereas I put 15 hours into Grow Up, partly because it genuinely is bigger but also because I just enjoyed that environment so much. I wasn't fixated on finding/doing the next thing. I still did plenty of climbing, and the climbing mechanic has been greatly improved, but it's just part of a game with a different focus now.

[boli]

I think they kind of broke their own game. They didn't realize what worked about the first one. It is kind of like a hit Hollywood movie and the typical overblown sequel, where they lose everything that made the first one good. None of the new stuff really adds much, and in fact it takes away. Then they dropped out so much fun stuff from the first game... I liked Grow Up but it's not nearly the cool experience that the first one was.

[JollyCharly]

Hello all,

thanks for your feedback, it is very precious for us, and I will pass it on to the devs.
If may say though, you don't HAVE to use the glider, the jet-pack, etc.
In Grow Up, the world is much bigger than in Grow Home, hence it was necessary to find new means of transportation to make it easier and faster to move around.
However, the beauty of the game is that you can make what you want of it! If you only want to climb and use the plants, as you did with Grow Home, nothing is stopping you.
The team added tools for the players to ease the game play, but in the end, it's your game, your way :)

Regards,
CM Grow Up

[vitoroba]

Hey there!

Yeah, continuin on to the discussion... I got to play through the whole game and I did enjoy it quite a bit. It's not that the game was better or worse than the first one, just a different experience altogether, as said before.

I guess the only problem was to expect to play Grow Home in a bigger world, when that is obviously not what the Devs went for in the sequel.

I guess my only gripe with the game really was that ease of exploration happened way too fast, so it never gave that sense of accomplishment for finally managing to get somewhere or stuff like that. Even though the world was bigger, it kinda felt smaller in a sense. Progression was kinda weird. And that makes the game more family-friendly, definitely, and again I believe that's what they aimed for.

But if people say "it's too easy" you can't go on about how they can play the way they like... that's just not very good game design, IMO. It's like giving someone a bazooka in a shooter game and saying they had a pistol and could make it hard for themselves if they wanted to.