Approximate amount of time to 100%: 20h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don't need a guide, but I wrote
the following achievement guide in case you want to look up something.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No, after finishing the game you can mop up the missing achievements
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
"Grow: Song of the Evertree" is from the makers of Yonder,
You can find my review for that game here . Yonder was already a great family-friendly adventure simulator game, but this game tops that one.
Since I found out about this game, far before the release I kept my eye on it, because this game just looks so magical and cute! Artwork in a game isn't everything but it absolutely helps with enjoying a game and this game has such a magical art style. During the whole game, I took my time to enjoy how beautiful things looked, and in my book, they made it extra cute with the reward for giving your flying mount (aka the teleportation option) a lot of love.
There is no fighting in this game, the closest thing to fighting is hitting some insects that are drenched in corruption mud with your hammer to free them from the mud, but that isn't really fighting since they won't attack you. There are also some enemies you have to avoid because they kill you when they touch you, but you won't only find a few of those in the game.
What you do in this game is build up a new city after the world got overgrown with corrupt vines. You'll unlock districts when playing through the game and in those spaces, you will build houses and other buildings to give the villagers the opportunity to work and they generate money over time. At first, you might think that healing different world seeds might be the main objective because that is the most fun part of the game, but that is just a tool that will provide you with the items needed to build up your city. Focus on the main objective to unlock districts and get the happiness rating to 100% for each district to unlock the next one.
Back to those world seeds, this is the most fun part of the game but gets less important later on in the story. At first, you'll enter a world seed that is overgrown with all sorts of things. It is up to you to clean it and plant bushes. flowers and trees. You'll see the land changing when you get further with healing, after a while insects and critters will join this world. And later on, you even unlock more areas that need the same treatment. After you finish a world you can add some Everkids to it to farm resources for you every few days. On the world map, you can see when they have gathered something for you.
That you can see things on the world map is one of the many quality of life features you'll find in this game. Others are the ability to access the warp system almost everywhere except when you're inside houses, caves, and temples. Another one that I used a lot is the ability to show you in a world where there is a task left for you, and it will also tell you when there are no tasks left. Another one you see gladly in a lot of games but still is a quality of life feature is auto-loot, your character will pick up items when you're close by, and later on, the range for this ability will increase a lot. The only Quality of life ability I missed was being able to skip the short cinematics that shows you a new area or after warping to a district. After a while, I got bored with waiting till the cinematic was done after warping to a new location. And while complaining, I have encountered a few visibility bugs and one sound bug. I know they are working on fixed and nothing was game-breaking. Gladly the game is very stable and I had no hiccups because the game doesn't auto-save. So don't forget to manually save from time to time.
The achievements for this game are very straight forward and almost all of them you will unlock by just playing through the game. If you don't mind using a guide for a little bit, I would suggest looking up the perfect world seeds, so you can make them early on and have the benefits of those different worlds with all their resources, but later on, you'll have enough resources that it shouldn't take long to make them if you didn't use a guide.
I haven't played all the games with amazing promises that came out this year yet.. so it isn't fair to call this game GOTY but for me, this is one of the best games of 2021 that I played this year (writing this at the end of 2021). I played through this game in one weekend and many times I thought "Ahh I have to do X in real life.. but I'll quickly do this thing and then I have to quit for now.. oh so close, I'm playing one more in-game day..". So be warned, if you like this kind of game, it can be very addictive, but it was great to get in the "zone" and forget about real life for a weekend.
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