After spending several years on mobile devices, Growtopia is bringing its seemingly limitless worlds to consoles. In a game where everything grows on trees, young players will gobble the chance to punch and build while those looking for depth may come up short without searching for intricately crafted worlds.
For the better part of a decade, mobile devices have become an intrinsic part of modern parenting. Is little Johnny crying? Pull up YouTube on your phone and let him become absorbed in a video at full volume much to the ire of everyone in proximity who has to hear it too. I’ve seen kids beg for tablets and phones so they can plop down and poke at a screen and play mostly mindless games flooded with bright colors and cute sounds. But as this trend continues, efforts are made to bridge the gap between idle childhood distraction and a title with a bit more gusto.
Growtopia, despite being available on mobile devices for almost seven years, won’t dodge any comparisons to familiar sandbox games that thrive on creativity and lack of direction. It will strike a chord for players with a passing knowledge of direct comparisons like Minecraft or Terraria or even more older-oriented games like ARK: Survival Evolved. The foundations of player-hosted worlds, flexibility, and near-limitless creativity hold true here. Yet there a few key differences allowing Growtopia the opportunity to draw a line in the sand around itself: it’s a free-to-play game where everything grows on trees.
“Everything you say?” Yes, everything. Toilets, pants, dirt, lava, signs, you know name it. Growtopia relies on the use of the almighty fist to bash apart the world. Your pixelated character ridiculously and crudely launches their fist in a direction like a violent Stretch Armstrong and begins hitting things. Once a background tile or an object has been destroyed, it usually drops a seed. Take a dirt seed and throw it on the ground and a tree will sprout that in a few seconds drops blocks of dirt. Seeds can also be spliced with other seeds to create something new. Want to make a flower? Throw a dirt seed down and then a grass seed and watch it grow. Following? You understand a massive portion of what Growtopia has to offer.
While the art of harvesting seeds and trees may sound like the most tepid distillation of Harvest Moon, the point of Growtopia is to foster the player’s vision, not complexity. The real estate provided in a server world can account for thousands of ideas as long as there is someone willing to invest the time into using this canvas.
I must go out of my way to say that games like Growtopia are not necessarily for me. That includes other titles where a survival element often comes into play. While I initially enjoy the risks of trying to keep alive in a world, the fear of losing everything sucks. Then you have games like Little Big Planet or Mario Maker that give players tools to create their own games or quirky works of digital art. I don’t have the time to truly embrace the leviathan of possibilities lying in wait. However, this is not to say that I don’t understand why others enjoy them or that there is nothing for me to be entertained by. The reasons such games continue to thrive is the communities they have built of other players stretching the possibilities to the limits. In that sense, Growtopia is the perfect fit for a publisher like Ubisoft.
In Growtopia, I’ve seen mazes, works of pixel art, platforming courses, shops, empty voids of nothing, and countless bizarrely-decorated player characters. Expressing yourself is a key element as the game has a long list of clothing items and equipment that range from the simple to the fantastical. Jetpacks, swords, Ezio’s assassin garb, and electric hair are just some of the tamer options. As long as the community for Growtopia expands on your preferred console, there is hope that some activity or world will hold enough appeal to spend a bit of time in. The adventurous types need this kind of content to maintain interest in the game. The amount of worlds I could go in on PlayStation 4 wasn’t daunting but could have been bigger.
The initial tutorial provided is okay but takes a bit to grasp on a controller. It also doesn’t help that despite their easy readability, the menus in Growtopia are often large and clunky. Navigating through them is simple but it feels like there could be more information provided to the player.
Again, many of these items players can interact with and build from are crafted from seeds and trees. But not every recipe can be crafted at the onset. You may think that this is where the free-to-play scheming sets it but Growtopia shows a good amount of restraint. Anyone can make an argument that a free game with microtransactions is out to swindle unsuspecting kids, but for a good amount of time, I never saw actual progress being hampered by dollar signs. The primary currency of Growtopia are gems. Gems are acquired through common gameplay activities like harvesting or completing achievements and quests but can also be bought outright with real money. Players can use gems to buy seeds from shops in a server or go to an in-game store to purchase more specific things.
Obviously, the most expensive things in Growtopia are the most elaborate. Players can spend 10,000 gems on a background for their world that looks like stars shooting through the night. Dogs, cats, and dragons can be bought as pets. The higher rarity trees take longer to grow (as in minutes to hours) so boosts to make them sprout faster can be purchased. Gems serve as a way for players to ease along gameplay, make an aesthetic statement, or dive deeper into customization.
The one sticking point I saw with gems is that they are also commonly used to buy locks that protect a specific number of surrounding tiles in a world. The more gems spent, the more coverage given up to where a world lock can be purchased to protect the entire created world. Similar items can be bought as a means to make a space private for that specific player and who they want to invite. Otherwise, others can come in and destroy or gift as they see fit. For some, it may take time before enough gems and items are collected to fashion a proper “home” that expresses a specific style. However, it does work both ways and having this kind of freedom can allow others to pop in and just engage in random silliness or harmless interaction with other players. A few worlds I stumbled into have had chatty inhabitants who weren’t just asking for trading, which is another positive for Growtopia.
If Growtopia sounds like a simple game, you would be correct. There is a definite demographic of younger players this game appeals to. The casual pixel art ensures everything is easily identifiable and colorful without being too stylish. But unless you are dead set on creating large, complex worlds in one go, I don’t think these games are designed with extended play in mind. The chance to drop into a world, plant a few seeds, and see the sights can be enough of a thrill until your next break or the next time your kids want to sit down and have silly, goofy fun in a game that really lends itself to it. And because the microtransactions don’t feel insidious, it’s an easier sell for cautious adults. Growtopia understands it is a playful game, meant to be handled in whatever way the player wishes. I mean really, this is a game where you can grow a toilet tree. Need I say more?
