Plantera is a 2016 simulator video game about growing the perfect garden. Available on Steam, this colorful and engaging clicker will grow on you.
Developed by VaragtP, Plantera is a clicker genre garden growing management game where you need to plant trees, berry bushes and various vegetables along with caring for farm animals while fending off harmless predators like birds, foxes and other vermins that will steal your harvest. As your garden grows, you can expand and acquire helpers to delegate the work better.
https://youtu.be/KhDhjgZfTFA
Plantera is a simple and harmless game. One that actually comes with a lot of fun especially when the game starts up and the music is exceptionally motivational and cheerful. It will get stuck in your head for a while. Just like many clicker games, Plantera starts off with more work on the player’s part as it levels up and more options are unlocked, particularly acquiring blue creatures as helpers that wander the garden harvesting. Later on, other protective means can be used such as acquiring dogs to help make sure nothing slips through their close surveillance of predators and expansion of the garden.
Clicker games are simple however they must also have a formula to make sure that it never becomes tedious with new features introduced. In that case, Plantera does a fairly good job. We played the game for over two hours on the first day and managed to unlock everything available. Unlocking new items ,whether it is a tree variety or a berry bush or farm animal, is on various predetermined levels. It creates a sense of purpose to see what mystery unlocks.
Plantera is surprisingly fun and addictive especially for its genre. However, the question remains what is the hold of the game after everything is unlocked? Perhaps the addition of objectives would be useful or an end game with a story. At this point, both of these features do not exist. While the game has happy and motivating music and a cute game with well thought out features and never is frustrating to play or even feel tedious (which says a lot about the clicker genre), we would like to see more and what comes next. As for now, it is cute and enjoyable for what it is and perhaps perfect for a little family fun with its simple game mechanics.