Developer: Prideful Sloth
Publisher: 505 Games
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Tested on: PC
Grow: Song of the Evertree – Preview
As we speak, the market is being flooded with games that share a lot of traits with titles such as Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. These casual city-building games are gaining a lot of ground, and some are almost copy-pasting the design of bigger titles in the genre, as was the case with Hokko Life, a game that didn’t hide the fact that it was basically an Animal Crossing clone. While we don’t mind games such as this, especially when they build further upon the foundation of their predecessors, we also love it when a developer comes around and does something very original. This seems to be the case with Prideful Sloth’s game, Grow: Song of the Evertree. We have only played the beta version of the game so far, but we were quite impressed with this adventurous fantasy city-builder.
As we don’t want to spoil the experience, we won’t be digging into the story content too much for this early build of the game. You’ll basically be the last alchemist that lives close to the Evertree, the massive tree of life that once connected everyone. Sadly, it is now corrupted due to the Withering, which keeps spreading all over the world of Alaria. You are the last person who seemingly has some semblance of hope left, and you are doing your best to restore the ‘Song’ that once connected all lifeforms. You, of course, start making steady progress, piquing the interest of those who left when the corruption started.
Graphically the game looks very nice. The cute character models, as well as the many details in the environments, are very detailed, and the game also offers a lot of customization options. We loved the minor details, where the blades of grass move as you walk over them, but also the fauna and flora of the different worlds are very nicely crafted. We enjoyed exploring the world, even though we’ve only seen a fraction of what the game has to offer.
Grow: Song of the Evertree will consist of two main components. On one hand, you’ll be exploring the world, growing seeds on the Evertree, restoring the tree’s health. You’ll be going around destroying debris and corruption, while planting seeds, watering plants, but also harvesting crops and collecting items. Doing this daily will allow you to collect more resources and more money, but it will also let your seed ‘worlds’ grow, giving you more and more to do. On the other hand, you’ll have the city-building aspect, where you restore the town of Alaria by building houses, shops, farms, and so on. This aspect does not solely consist of building and customizing buildings and decorations, but you’ll also have to attract new inhabitants to your town, assign them to houses and jobs, and eventually make sure everyone is happy.
As you’re an alchemist, you also get to dabble with alchemy. All the items you find you can deconstruct, granting you materials to craft new things once again. The system is quite simple at the beginning, and it doesn’t offer much more than decomposing items to gain materials for your blooming town. Nonetheless, it’s an easy system to work with and we quite enjoyed the inclusion of crafting mechanics.
For a beta version of the game, everything already felt highly polished, safe for a few invisible walls and some clipping issues. We did like the UI and how clear everything was. This might have been an oversight on our part, but we did not unlock a simple map function to properly view the area we were walking in. We would love the inclusion of a small mini-map, as this would make navigating certain parts of the world easier. Given the large size of the map, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you start exploring. We also found certain actions to be a bit slow, especially when you have to repeat them numerous times in a row.
Conclusion
Even though it feels like we only saw the tip of the iceberg of what is Grow: Song of the Evertree, we were already very impressed and entertained. The game gives you loads to do, from destroying the Withering, creating your own world(s), and building a prospering town and community. We loved how smooth the game played and how user-friendly everything was. We did find a few of the dialogues to be a bit on the dull and long side, but that’s only us nitpicking on an otherwise amazingly fun experience.
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