Reviews

Review by jroatch all reviews by jroatch

amarillion's review will be more worth to read then this one, especially the part about how dialing system works: "to get 6, you have press 6 six times", otherwise you'll be stuck on how to progress further the then first flower type.

This is exponential growth game, like cookie clicker, but without the base clicks. Which means the game will be especially slow at the beginning.

The ground that the flowers like to be in seems to be the middle of not being in forests, empty space, deserts (which sometimes looks like lava), and snow. I'll be obvious when the ground is unsuitable as the flower immediately dies. There are save (floppy disk) and load (arrow pointing to a letter inbox) buttons on the left side of the screen, so you can use those to guess and check what's good ground without losing much money.

There's no end goal other then the $100000 Ajuga, as the farmer specialist will never be available. So by that point of the game you'll be free to plant whatever flowers everywhere, with plenty of income to spare.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 2 Technical 4 Genre 5

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Botanim is essentially an investment game. You invest by planting flowers. With a bit of patience, they grow, and you can harvest them to recoup your investments. You harvest by clicking, and the more you click, the more money you make. After a while you will be able to afford more expensive flowers. The cost & earnings of consecutive flowers increase steeply, setting you on a path to exponential wealth accumulation.

It reminds me of another game that combines clicking with an investment mechanic - Insaniquarium. In that game you have to invest in fish instead of flowers, but it's surprisingly similar.

Botanim is a hard game to get into. There is not much happening in the beginning - the game requires patience - and could use a higher speed setting. Also because there is no sound and music, there isn't a whole lot to discover in the beginning. The world is very large, which also doesn't help. I first planted some flowers, then started looking around the map while I was waiting for them to grow - but I couldn't find my flowers back anymore (I always have the same problem in Minecraft)

But after a while the game gets going and it actually starts to get fun to try to make the map as colorful as possible.

Investments are risky. It takes 100 clicks to harvest enough corn flowers to be able to afford one tulip - and most of the time, you will only see it die immediately after planting. So that's a bit disheartening. One tactic that I found useful is to pick a spot, and try plants sequentially from cheap to expensive until one sticks. There is a hidden pattern underlying the map of where each flower will grow, and it requires trial and error to find out.

The game leaves you with the impression that there is a lot going on under the hood, but it doesn't present you with enough information to figure it out. There is a hidden pattern of hot/cold wet/dry spots, but I still haven't figured out how to know which is which. The icy/deserty/foresty patches seem to only loosely correspond to where flowers will grow. There are similarities to my LD46 game Exo Keeper (https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/618101). Ironically, it also has the same issues. On that game I also got the feedback that the game was too hard to figure out and therefore seemingly random.

A small bug: when scrolling and releasing ctrl-key or middle mouse button while outside the map area (e.g. on one of the side bars - the game stays in scroll mode and the map sticks to your mouse)

It took me a while to understand how the research dialing system works. I now get that to get 6, you have press 6 six times. But I didn't connect the dots for a while. A bit of tweaking and usability testing would go a long way here.

All in all, a difficult game with a lot of potential. But I feel that a few tweaks are necessary to make the game more fun: make it easier to discover where a flower will grow, so you don't have to risk it all to advance. And make it so you don't need excessive clicks.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 5