While Sonic, Mario, and endless gruff, personality-deficient marines have established themselves as gaming’s most recognisable mascots, the joys of horticulture have long been an important part of our wonderful hobby. Most recent in the memory is record-breaking Roblox phenomenon Grow A Garden, but the foundations for that success were laid by gaming-royalty ancestors such as Stardew Valley, FarmVille, Viva Piñata, Harvest Moon, and SimFarm. In fact, one of the earliest appearances of growing produce as a gameplay mechanic was, believe it or not, in 1964, via Mabel Addis’s text-based resource management game The Sumerian Game.
The thread that sowed these games together was a focus on slow, contemplative decision-making. Gardening is relaxing, right? Planted!, Cloth Cat Games’ competitive multiplayer riot, seeks to upend that tradition by introducing violence, time-limit stress, and blatant swindling. Monty Don would be appalled.
Planted!’s premise is simple and clever. Battling against three other players or working in teams of two, you must dig soil beds, plant seeds, and then throw the fruits (and veggies) of your labour into a merchant’s waiting receptacle, or directly at your opponents’ heads. Every plant you deposit earns you money, and whoever finishes with the most dosh wins.
You can grab objects and the first of these is usually the shovel to prepare the ground. After that, you shake a seed packet over your plots and have instant, though underwhelmingly small, yields. If you want prize produce then you can add fertiliser, hopefully grabbed faster than your adversaries from the random item drops, and hydrate the plants with a watering can, water balloon, or placeable sprinkler.
Once plants have reached their maximum size, they’ll hop excitedly, itching to get out of the ground. Simply hold A for a moment to pull it up and then toss it into whichever truck, skip, goal, or volcano serves as the repository for that level. You’ll get more money for bigger produce, of course, and you can further line your pockets by throwing it from a greater distance or maintaining a delivery combo.
The sprinkler is one of 12 available power-ups, which also include helpful minions, timed-fuse grenades, and even automated turrets, the latter of which you’ll quickly wish you had all of the time. That’s because it’s possible to steal other players’ crops, and the jostling for the best stuff irrespective of where it is growing is unrelenting. Green-fingered, but red-handed, thieving takes a little longer than pulling up your own crops, and can be interrupted if the owner grabs the same plant before you, or hits you with any thrown object.
There are eight arenas in which to do battle, ranging from a simple four-plot garden to a football pitch where each team must get its veg into the opposing goal. More elaborate ideas include a building site where you must keep ascending an under-construction skyscraper.
Levels that fall into the latter camp (there’s also a cave level in which stalactites keep breaking the ground and causing you to fall to the next level) are ambitious, multi-part epics, but while they ramp up the chaos they also introduce additional frustration. It’s annoying enough to have your hard work pilfered by another player at the last moment, but even more infuriating to have to start again from scratch just as your fruit hits its maximum size.
Some of this is mitigated as you learn the timings of each level and better understand what to prioritise, but it can feel unbalanced at times. The Islands level, which sees a bridge between two landmasses intermittently cut off as the tide rises and falls, became impossible to win once the opposing team had established two turrets next to it. We were left waiting for an occasional passing barge to use a stepping stone over to the other side, where our delivery boat waited, while they could come and go as they pleased.
These problems are exacerbated by controls that feel distinctly woolly. Platforming is vague, and the delay introduced by the need to hold A when harvesting robs the game of the snappiness that its otherwise fast-paced gameplay would benefit from. There are other areas where the game lacks the polish of its peers, like the inability to leave one of the four player slots empty if there are only three of you (you either have to fill it with a bot, or set it as an online player and wait for the unskippable arena select countdown to end).
That’s not to say that fans of the chaotic PvP modes in Overcooked!, Moving Out!, and Tools Up! (what is it with these games and exclamation marks?) won’t find plenty to enjoy here. Cloth Cat Games demonstrates a deep love for the genre, and clearly has no shortage of creative ideas when it comes to gameplay twists. There’s a chunky singleplayer story to work through, too, broken down into gardening challenges and platforming or mini games, though its appeal will come down to how willing you are to forgive those imprecise controls.
Overall, Planted! comes across as a promising first crop, one convincing enough to make the prospect of a sequel enticing, but the package presented here feels like it needed a little longer in the ground before it was harvested.
