Cloud Gardens is a casual, laid-back, puzzle-solving experience. That being said, it’s not the type of game that you will want to play for hours on end, but it’s entertaining in short spurts. It offers over one hundred levels, which sounds impressive, but bear in mind that many of the assets are constantly reused, making levels feel tedious after a while.
Cloud Gardens
Noio · Sep 1, 2021
About
In Cloud Gardens players must harness the power of nature to overgrow lo-fi scenes of urban decay and manufactured landscapes. By planting seeds in the right places, they’re able to create small overgrown dioramas of brutalism and beauty, salvaging and repurposing hundreds of discarded objects to create unique structures for nature to reclaim. Players can dive into a relaxing sandbox mode with no goals, where they are simply left to delight in their own creativity and create beautiful scenes, or take on a “campaign” of six chapters, where the task is to strike a balance between nature and the manufactured by covering each scene with salvaged objects and lush vegetation.
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- All in all, Cloud Gardens is definitely a title that leans more towards experience than game, but its classification matters much less than how it feels to play around with its tools or the positive message it espouses. By focusing on creating and elevating green spaces, we can return our world to one where nature is in harmony and a balance is struck between humanity’s footprint and mother nature’s embrace.
- Cloud Garden is a very good puzzle game that aims to soothe where many puzzle games can cause stress. There are a few-quality-of life issues but what is on offer is well worth checking out for any puzzle fans out there. The strength of Cloud Garden is how peaceful and lonely an experience it is, justifying its purchase for anyone.
- Cloud Gardens is an absolute zen-like delight that is only being held back by its clumsy and inaccurate controls. We found ourselves quite enthralled by the game’s setting and the compositions that we were trying to make. The concept of making dystopian art-like composition works, and the gameplay remains entertaining throughout the course of the game’s many levels. For its current price tag, you can’t really go wrong, but if you have no intention of playing this one in handheld mode, we suggest picking up the PC version instead.
- 7.0Cloud Gardens is a gentle-looking, gentle-sounding toy in the “chill” genre. It has a pretty good game hung on top, participation in which is largely optional. Noio’s stated aim “to fill you with satisfaction without the frustration” is a motto that’s been observed. Your mileage will vary based on what you find satisfying and what you find frustrating, but the gameplay, the themes, the music, the sound, and the graphics are all of a piece, admirably on-message, and contribute to a unique, bittersweet atmosphere.
- 8.0Cloud Gardens is a dystopian sandbox puzzle-slash-sim from Noio where you make the most of the apocalypse by making plants grow. It’s an ultra-Zen title that forces you to slow down, think about life, and do a little gardening - which is a totally welcome experience for when you need a breath of fresh air in today’s suffocating world.
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