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Blueberry Garden
Bbgarden
Early screenshot

Developers

Erik Svedang

Released

June 10th, 2009

Genre

Exploratory platformer

Modes

Single Player

Platforms

Windows

Input

Keyboard

Website

gamepage

Blueberry Garden is an experimental game by Erik Svedang about a birdman, trying to turn off a watertap that is flooding the world.

It is a rather short game, whether finishing it or flooding the world, it takes about an hour to have reached either goal.

Though simple in concept, the system requirements for the game are rather high. This is because the entire world is rendered and changing at all times.

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Gameplay[]

The initial goal in the game is to turn of the watertap that is flooding the world. You glide, but not really get high on your own. The way to advance and reach new places is thus to grow a stack of the giant objects that lay about in the world. If you stand close to them, you and them are ported back to the starting point. There is a door under the stack that ports you to the top of the stack.

There are quite a few items you can get to easily without much thinking. After you obtain the low hanging fruit though, you need to be more inventive and start using the game's more emergent elements. There are a couple of animals and fruits scattered in the world, with the former being more for company and curiosity, the latter have some actual use to play.

You can pick up fruit and carry it somewhere, and even return home with it (Home key). Fruit will go bad after a while though and dissappear, leaving behind its seeds. This grows into a new plant that bears more of the same fruit. Using this attribute, you can arrange most of the world with the fruits you want to. The benefit of having these fruits in place become more obvious when you eat them. Each fruit having a specific effect, some of these are being able to stay under water much longer, flying higher (initially), elevating the ground and some fruit floating towards the nearest item to collect. When you turn off the watertap, the game seemingly ceases to have a goal, though you can continue to play it. A hint to what to do next will also appear next to the tower door.

Awards[]

It is the winner of the 2009 IGF Seamus Mcnally Grand Prize.

Trivia[]

  • For a long time it was a requirement of the game to have a physical "Home" key to return to the beginning at will. Many laptops not having this key, this gave a lot of people a handicap, though returning home is not required to finish the game. It was patched several months after release, so that the "H" key would have the same function.
  • Because of the emergent nature of the environment, some creatures will go extinct after a while, so if you want to see the coolmoose, you should go to the far right early in the game.

External links[]

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