This week, Noio released their new game called Cloud Gardens. They self-describe this game as a chill game where you can use plants to overgrow abandoned wasteland dioramas. In Cloud Gardens you can create urban scenes with plants and other stuff like traffic signs and abandoned cars and just let your imagination run wild in the ‘’campaign mode’’ or in the sandbox mode. And of course, the developers of Noio were so kind to provide us a key to check it out!
What do you do
I already mentioned it a bit but let’s dive a bit deeper into what the exact goal of the game is and how you complete that goal. When playing Cloud Gardens, the game provides you with a piece of scenery, like a parking lot with a sidewalk and a lamppost on it. Now it’s your goal to decorate it so that it looks like nature has run its course and that it gets that urban feeling. In order to complete this, the game provides you with some plants that can grow. You also get pieces of scenery like traffic cones, some old tires, traffic signs, some more lampposts, it’s just a mix of everything really. In order to continue to the next level, your scenario needs to reach a certain level.
How we feel so far
Now, the graphics aren’t the game’s strongest asset, and it looked a bit easy to me, plus you don’t get any written information about what you need to do exactly. This is a point that the devs probably should work on since the game feels a tad weird now. You just pas on to the next level and then for some reason you are stuck there and can’t continue.
Cloud Gardens contains a sandbox mode where you just simply let your imagination run wild and it also has some sort of a campaign mode where there are six different chapters to play through, with each level getting a bit harder to complete. I liked the variation; a little something for everyone!
In conclusion
First of all, I should mention that I played this game while it was in Early Access so changes can be made before it got released earlier this week. If you are looking for a challenging and exciting game, you might want to skip this one. If you have a creative spirit, love plants, and urban sceneries, you might actually enjoy it but keep in mind that the game is very simple and that their self-description that it was a chilling game is actually very accurate. Personally, I think that the developers should focus a bit more on the graphical aspect so that everything just looks a bit better, and add some more guidance in it so you don’t have to figure it out all by yourself.