You start with limited cash, a handful of seeds, some soil and water. The object is to breed and cross breed plants until you find the 6 Magic Plants of Isola and solve the genetic puzzle. Plant Tycoon® is a gardening sim game where you nurture plants and experiment with increasingly rare and valuable species. In an ideal world my quest would lead me to a game/desktop companion which took the slow, guided development of actual gardening, married it with the highly stylised plant aesthetic of My Organic Garden and added the almost-white-noisey-weather sounds and chimes of Mountain.Plant Tycoon® is a gardening sim game where you nurture plants and experiment with increasingly rare and valuable species.
Then it's a bit less satisfying and a bit more OH GOD IT IS ALL DEAD AGAIN. Apart from where I keep forgetting time passes even when you don't have the game open and I come back to a dead greenhouse. More like a second job and a satisfying time sink than a mood lifter. It's a different beast from the gardening quest, though. There are 529 kinds of plant here so it ought to keep me going for a while but there is, ultimately, an end point. The idea of completing it started to feel like a lifetime's work and I do (sometimes) have better things to do with my life. I got cross with Pocket Frogs because it began to feel unmanageable. Plant Tycoon is a bigger, better version of the thrill I used to get in Pocket Frogs when trying to produce little hopping collections of pixels with the right patterns and the right colouration. There's also a relatively simple genetic inheritance element at play if you want to pay attention to it. I like the shapes of these seeds, and I like the surprise you get when rearing one of these mystery hybrids for the first time. What I'm more interested in is that you can cross-pollinate the plants to produce new species of increaasing value and with increasingly demanding and expensive lifestyles (or whatever you call their nutrient demands and general upkeep requirements). You fill those pots with soil, water them a bit and then add a seed. Not for its menus or interface - the main screen is a set of greenhouse work benches with predefined plant pot spaces. Plant Tycoon was likely not going to be that but it was appealing on the aesthetic front. Essentially, I want a way of utilising my second screen so it can provide a mood boost rather than just housing Twitter. What it's about it providing a gradually changing aesthetic which I have a limited influence over and which I can stare at while stressed about an email or grumpy when a feature isn't flowing. It's not really about the actual gardening, exactly. Mostly what I want is a lovely-looking handful of plants which sometimes require me to snip off dead leaves, or maybe I could dust their leaves, or give them a splash of water. Plant Tycoon is about eight years old on PC, older on Palm OS, and came up as part of my quest to find a relaxing gardening game I can run in the background while working. With my finger firmly on the pulse as I am when it comes to pop culture and/or videogames, I am currently ensconced in the world of Plant Tycoon.
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