Follow the Botanist as they travel through space, searching planets for the rare plants needed to solve the food shortage back home.
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An intriguing pitch, The Botanist is a comic that boasts a cutesy short story sequence with you turning the pages using the Playdate’s crank, along with using other interactive elements that help progress it along. I’ll ignore the money-to-experience ratio, as I went in expecting some loss in that department. At 8 dollars, 10 minutes long, and with a static story, the game has a low-replayability and little investment potential. That’s all good and well, the problem is when you actually see what it has to offer.
The art is fine, the interactivity is lower than it should have been, in scope and creativity, but the true nail in the coffin is the completely incomprehensible “story”. That is, there is no story, no narrative, no message, no real characters. There’s thousands of stories that can and have been told without dialogue, and done in much less time than The Botanist has. The issue is that it’s not really a comic, moreso a loose collection of images with vague connections to each other. I love arthouse, minimalist games with outside the box methods of communicating information and involving the player. Though The Botanist claims to do this, it feels more like a bait and switch, or to be more fair, an unfinished game altogether. Some more time in the oven with a clear intention laid out and implemented would have made me much more receptive to what we got.
The art is fine, the interactivity is lower than it should have been, in scope and creativity, but the true nail in the coffin is the completely incomprehensible “story”. That is, there is no story, no narrative, no message, no real characters. There’s thousands of stories that can and have been told without dialogue, and done in much less time than The Botanist has. The issue is that it’s not really a comic, moreso a loose collection of images with vague connections to each other. I love arthouse, minimalist games with outside the box methods of communicating information and involving the player. Though The Botanist claims to do this, it feels more like a bait and switch, or to be more fair, an unfinished game altogether. Some more time in the oven with a clear intention laid out and implemented would have made me much more receptive to what we got.
Buyers should know up-front that this is only a 15-20 minute experience. In fact, props to the dev for being clear about that on the store page! If you assess games using a price/minute heuristic, then this is not a game for you. However, if you can appreciate an incredible technical and artistic showpiece that highlights the Playdate's beautiful display, then I would recommend trying the Illumination free demo first. Only then, if you want more, buy The Botanist to support the dev and the robust comic framework he's put together for this game. A ton of work went into all the assets and and the framework itself (Panels), and it shows.
Although The Botanist itself is short, it's a lot more than a normal comic. Each panel is beautifully illustrated with excellent parallax effects, and the game is packed with variety both in how the the panels are laid out and how you can interact with them. The game does a great job at showcasing what is possible with the Playdate as a medium for interactive comics. The story is well-done and atmospheric, yet in my opinion the way the story is presented stands out much more than the content itself.
Although The Botanist itself is short, it's a lot more than a normal comic. Each panel is beautifully illustrated with excellent parallax effects, and the game is packed with variety both in how the the panels are laid out and how you can interact with them. The game does a great job at showcasing what is possible with the Playdate as a medium for interactive comics. The story is well-done and atmospheric, yet in my opinion the way the story is presented stands out much more than the content itself.