Grow: Song of the Evertree is a vast ocean of intimidating mechanics. It is a farming, city building, life management and creature collecting simulation with light adventure elements rolled into one.
Unfortunately, if the ocean is wide, it is not very deep.
Grow: Song of the Evertree Review – An Adventure in Disharmony
The opening introduces you to the land of Alaria, a place protected by The Evertree, an ancient entity powered by The Song. One day, The Song and his bond with the people of Alaria broke, allowing The Withering to take over the land. Your character, the last Everheart Alchemist, stayed to bring back The Evertree by creating a World Seed and restoring The Song.
While the stories about this land and these characters are interesting and one of Grow's strengths, Grow: Song of the Evertree's problems start early. The opening is incredibly slow, not really starting until about five o'clock.
The main problem during those first few hours is that Grow throws too many mechanics at you at once and learning them quickly becomes boring.
The first of many things Grow teaches you is farming, all of which takes place on branch worlds created by placing a world seed on an altar on The Evertree. The interesting part of this process is that you can shape the appearance of a world and the plants it contains by creating a seed of the world with different flavors of essences, a variable type of currency in Grow. A worldseed composed of dry, parched, and pungent essences, for example, will create a world of branches more akin to the make-up of a desert than a world composed of different essences.
Despite this trick, farming is the least engaging part of Song of the Evertree. There's an intrinsic satisfaction to building efficient farms in other similar games, but Grow doesn't have it. Concretely, structuring worlds of branches is impossible.
Patches that can be grown into plants are placed randomly around an area, and instead of turning them into manageable, orderly rows that can be seeded and watered efficiently, Grow forces you to fully cultivate patches when you find them.
Lost rubble should be hammered away from an area. Then, after switching to a seed pack, the seeds can be planted on the plot. Then, the passage to the watering can makes it possible to water this plot before moving on to the next one. Repeating the process dozens of times quickly becomes squeaky, and growing a world of branches boils down to a mad dash to find all of the interactive squares in whatever chaos layout the game provides, then perform the many moves to grow cultures.
It sounds like such a small glitch, but with how long it takes to cultivate a plot, it's a mechanism that slows down the whole experience.
The next thing you learn in Grow is city management. This shows how a city management sim would be expected to play, where you'll buy buildings from a menu with some of the resources being farmed and place those buildings around the available building area.
These buildings range from houses to stores like bakeries and general stores. When the airship dock is repaired, tourists from other worlds will want to move in. If you provide houses to these NPCs, you will be able to assign them to shops. After being assigned a worker, this store will become functional and generate Myora, Grow's main form of money.
The city management section is more satisfying than the farming section, but still has issues with how it relates to story progression.
A Stone of Harmony unlocks with each area of ​​the city. These give you a list of tasks to do to unlock the next area of ​​town. These tasks require you to do things like “Decorate five houses three times” or “Move 14 people into the area”. They add an objective to each area - which is nice - but after completing a Stone of Harmony I would continually drop customization and building the previous town area to work on the next one.
There isn't enough reason to engage with the other aspects of city management beyond what the Stone of Harmony wants. Each villager has skills that can be upgraded, and each building has a star rating that can be increased, mechanics that I chose not to interact with as it would mean delaying unlocking the world.
Delaying unlocking more of the overworld is especially punishing, as the overworld contains the most successful parts of Song of the Evertree.
Exploring the content-rich world of Alaria is inherently satisfying. Areas are full of things to do, like chopping down trees and catching bugs. There are caves to discover and explore. Figuring out how to open them, and then exploring them to find actually useful treasures, is a real highlight.
By exploring these areas, it is also possible to find larger puzzle dungeons. These are all fun to solve and visually intriguing. The puzzles are mostly 3D platforming challenges, but could be based on any of the farming mechanics used in a unique and engaging way.
Dungeons never overstay their welcome; when I feel like I'm ready for a dungeon's end, I am. Each also hides a piece of the broken song, so completing one is always rewarding.
The adventure elements provide a cohesively designed slice of growth that contrasts with the confusing decisions behind the management sections. Running in the loose sections is where Grow: Song of the Evertree really sings.
Along with the joys of the adventure sections, it's hard not to be captivated by the Grow soundtrack. Each song is dynamic and layered. String sections and piano parts bounce and swap tracks in a beautiful soundscape. Arriving in the Plains District with the music playing my favorite song affects me every time.
Unlike the music, the visuals are a mixed bag. From the opening cutscene to the rest of the Nintendo Switch experience, texture pop-ins are common and there are far too many framerate issues. Prideful Sloth reduced the graphics quality and resolution of this version compared to the others, but they persist despite Grow's cartoony and cute graphics. These issues can be alleviated somewhat by decreasing the field of view, but this is a less than ideal solution.
Despite the technical issues, it's still possible for Grow to look good on Switch. Coming home after sunset when it's lit by the night sky and the purple glow of withered roots is truly beautiful. However, the visuals elsewhere don't always live up to that standard.
House decorations, new hairstyles, and unlockable clothes all look worse than their default counterparts, making getting cosmetic rewards undesirable and disappointing. Most human characters have the same face. An area called Everywhere hurts my eyes to look at - it's an incredibly red landscape with red objects stacked on top of each other.
Grow: Song of the Evertree Review – The Bottom Line
Benefits
- Nice soundtrack
- Overworld is fun to explore
- The pieces of the puzzle are satisfactory
The inconvenients
- Tedious farm mechanics
- unrewarding town management mechanic
- Many aspects are visually unattractive
- Technical problems
Grow: Song of the Evertree tries to be too much. There are too many ideas and systems for them all to fit together harmoniously. It's the friction between the systems that makes me either scratch my head while playing or, at worst, get frustrated.
Add technical issues to the mix with a sprinkle of unwanted rewards, and Grow is mostly underwhelming. There could be a good match here, but it's hard to hear through all the noise.
[Note: The code for Grow: Song of the Evertree used in this review was provided.]
