Last week, Digitalchumps was privy to a playtest of Cloth Cat Games’ multiplayer game Planted. It’s a chaotic game that centers on farming with friends and trying to screw them over in the process. This will test friendships, that is for certain.
The gameplay for Planted has four players with sectioned-off garden areas. Each person has the opportunity to plant veggies, grow them big, and then sell them off quickly for profit. The person with the most profit at the end is the winner of the match. It’s an easy concept on paper, much like communism.
The catch in the gameplay is that each person can invade the other’s garden section, sabotage it, or steal the veggies being grown to turn them in for money. On the surface, the gameplay described is simple. Moving around to disrupt and/or sabotage another person’s area is easy. Stealing from another person isn’t quite as easy, as once a player begins pulling another’s veggie or fruit out of the ground, it takes measured time for that to happen. During that time frame, the owner of said garden can disrupt the theft, which resets the stealing process. Nothing at all complicated about the main gameplay elements.
Now, if that weren’t enough with this game, it also adds randomly falling items to help grow the gardens. These items could be a bucket of water, seeds, and plant food. The items falling are finite in quantity, which will automatically send every gardener into a frenzy for resources. So, just to recap, sabotage, steal, and fight for resources. All of those are part of the gameplay that makes this chaos fun.
Folks, that’s not the last thing at stake during the gameplay. During the game, there are two glowing portals on the east/west side of the map where random items will appear within. The items might be helpful to the growing process, or they can be as violent as a bomb that is already lit when grabbed. Of course, the latter is the more amusing of the items, as players can drop the bombs at the right time, right place, and around the right people to do damage to everything. And, yes, I mean everything. The bombs will hurt the garden area that they are dropped on, which will force the owner of said area to rebuild it quickly to get their profit margins up. The bomb can also hurt the people within its blast radius. Those folks caught in the blast will be temporarily delayed in getting back into the game, which means less profit for them.
The only hiccup in the playtest is the amount of chaos going on during the game. Having four separate players trying to screw each other over can make for insanely chaotic gameplay. There were times during my playtest with another writer when I lost myself on the screen because so much was going on. For an old guy like me, I must know where I am and what I am doing at all times. Those are the two goals for people over 50. Anyway, the small space given on the map compacted the gameplay process and added so much intensity and overstimulation that this game was hellbent on perpetuating. In other words, mission accomplished by the game. The developers wanted to make this a garden-variety frenzy, and they certainly did that with the gameplay.
Overall, Planted has some darn good potential to be wacky fun. I can see this gameplay showing up on Reddit a lot. It will certainly kick-start some laughter and make for some good times on video when it comes out. Right now, it’s still baking in the sun, and we’ll let you know when the full game is ready for harvesting.
Until then, keep an eye out for this one. It’s going to be an interesting release.