The New Flesh

Blueberry Garden is a lovely game, there’s no other word for it, lovely. It’s also small yet perfectly formed.

One thing I knew from the first moment I loaded the up the demo is it’s a beautiful little game, one of the most beautiful games ever made. It’s visually lovely as you can see from the screenshot below but it’s the sound design that’s truely astounding with the subtle effects for creatures, movement and the wind all balancing perfectly with a lovely soundtrack of piano music that kicks in when you fly, an inspired design choice that makes the flying a truly magical experience rather than just another game mechanic to exploit.

Gameplay wise it’s a simple 2D platformer with a gliding mechanic based arround exploration and object collection with some interesting little power-ups in the form of various fruit that grow in the garden.

However looking at it in those terms completely misses the point because this isn’t a game about the gameplay. This is a game about the experiences, the experience of flying, the experience of discovering what the star shaped fruit does and the experience of working hard to stand next to a giant tomato at the bottom of a lake without drowning. In that respect it’s very much an art game. It also pitches it’s central puzzle at just the right level to fit into the whole experience centric approach. Initially you won’t know what the heck you’re meant to be doing but trial and error will pretty soon show you what you can do and shortly there after that you’ll work out why you’d want to, this delivers the feeling of having worked it out but there’s never any feeling of needing to solve it, never any feeling like the game is an enemy to be defeated that would take you out of the experience (I’m looking at you Braid).

The game also has quite a serious message if you look for one but it doesn’t ram it down your throat in the same way ‘The Path’ does, it doesn’t use it’s message as an excuse for the rest of the experience like ‘The Path’ does, the rest of experience stands up on it’s own and in that I think Blueberry Garden is undoubtedly the superior game. That’s good because like ‘The Path’ the message is nothing new and in many cases will be preaching to the converted but unlike The Path that isn’t a let down because it wasn’t sold to me on the basis of being a meaningful game with a deep message. In fact the pitch from Steam store page is worth quoting for truth: -

Blueberry Garden is a short and experimental game about exploring a strange world. It is set in an ever-changing ecosystem and your goal is to find out what’s going on among the softly swaying trees and mysterious creatures living there.

The game is a relaxing, yet intense experience for people who like soaring through the sky.

I’m not sure about “intense” but everything else is spot on and how often does that happen? It’s honesty and lack of pretension is refreshing. Rightly or wrongly the fact that Blueberry Garden doesn’t claim to be art when it clearly is is counts as a point in its favour in my book. Much like ‘Everyday Shooter’ it’s an art game but it doesn’t play the parasitic pretentious talking game that has attached itself to most art in the last 100 years or so and that’s a good thing.

Now as much as the game is lovely and has a fair chunk of artistic merit it does also have two major weaknesses. Firstly it apparently has stability issues. It works fine on my system but the word on the threads is that some people are finding it unstable or simply unplayable so it’s probably worth playing the demo just to check it runs okay on your system. The second is length, it’s by a long long way the shortest game I’ve ever paid for. I’ve played it through three times to get the good ending, the bad ending and then the good ending again because I didn’t want to leave it on the bad ending and according to Steam I played it a total of 1.4 hours. Now length and value are two different things, lets not make that mistake, all things being equal a 20 hour game that’s full of padding is worse then a well paced 10 hour game. However length is undoubtedly a factor that influences value and whilst the relationship might not be as simple as ‘longer is better’ there is strong relationship there. Blueberry Garden is well paced but the fact that at a good pace it has about half an hour of content does raise an eyebrow and make it a rather expensive compared to most games. On the other hand Erik Svedang seems like a real nice guy and I’d undoubtedly love to see what else he can come up with so the money is going to a good cause rather than say paying for Activision Blizzard to sue Double Fine (Damn you Activision Blizzard! You aren’t helping! *shakes fist*) and £4 same price as a block of cheese and Blueberry Garden has far fewer calories. The acid test has to be if I had my time over would I do differently and the answer is no, I’d still buy it and therefore the price must have been worth paying but it is pushing it with regards value for money so I’m really not sure I could recommend without some reservation.

Putting a number to this is hard because it’s such an extreme combination of good and short. I feel a right bastard for beating such a small but perfectly formed game with the value stick but it really comes down to the fact I could only recommend it to fans of indie games and 7 is conventionally the number that corresponds to ‘good but only get it if you like the genre’ but… screw it. It’s a 9.

9/10