Botanicula continues in the point-and-click entertainment that's been typical of Amanita Design studio. This game brings an imaginative mix of visual story-telling and rebuses making it extremely engaging and entertaining fun for everyone.
This game cures depression. Just kidding but seriously this is a relaxing and charming gem ****. It's point and click but not the kind where you get stuck.
Great game. i have spent a lot of time on this title. It has a great story with memorable characters. Good gameplay and best cut scenes with good dialogs.
If you can pull yourself away from killing things for a few hours to play a sweet, adorable, bizarre, funny, joyful game, you owe it to yourself to buy Botanicula. It's not massively challenging and it only really lasts four hours, but you'll have a smile on your face for the entire time – and often a good laugh too.
Botanicula is one big orchestra, and the mouse cursor is the choirmaster. It's sometimes too much of a puzzle game, sometimes too little, but always a treat to listen to and observe.
Botanicula can't hide its shortcomings, mostly the short duration (about three hours for completion), the non-existent replay value and the tiresome transitions between riddles in the hub. However, its magic atmosphere, the surrealistic portrayal of nature and the happy disposition that sips through from this strange world, compile a unique title, true to the standards of its Czech developers. [July 2012]
Solve puzzles in a bizarre colorful environment, using different characters with different abilities. But the puzzles are too easy and too illogical for this game to be much more than mediocre.
This is going to be a very short review since I cannot think of any aspect of Botanicula that is less than excellent: Graphics, sound effects, music, atmosphere, imagination, humour, charm...
Flawless and marvellous. I never rate anything 10/10, but here I have to make an exception.
Super cute point and click game - it felt a little bit too long for me, because while there is certainly a lot of innovation going on with this game, there's only so much point and click I can do before getting bored.
Conclusion:
Botanicula is a point&click adventure and exploration game driven by a pictured, unspoken narrative. It is set in a rather ficional, microscopic world of plants and their inhabitants.
The game being executed in a rather special style is not a bad thing, but does not conform a mainstream audience. I would recommend it only to completely open-minded players or die-hard point&click adventure fans, not for the puzzles but for the funny situations one gets to see and the rather drawing narrative. In that way does the title serve its purpose as exploration game great.
For a retail price of 10$ and a casual playthrough in 3 hours with some puzzle related obstacles, the "h of fun/$" ratio is rather low but still worth buying compared to visiting a cinema. By now the game is reasonable priced regularly. A high amount of replayability can not be found in this title but the soundtrack is worth hearing it after a playthrough and makes one relive some good memories around this game.
Execution:
The gameplay focuses on puzzles given by the game. It mainly resolves around finding an item to bring it to a certain spot where it would be needed. Finding those items may resolve around reactions one has to experiment with before. Some alternative choices spice up the experiment but only lead to dead ends, which are often enough represented with some kind of humor.
The art is consistent and the user interface is as non-intrusive as possible to focus the perception on the pictures itself. Characters are displayed as asymmetrical and natural as one would expect from the setting and displayed background. The sounds feel disruptive in the beginning, some even feel broken in the way they were recorded. The music however is often a lively loop, enhancing the perception on the pictures. It is worth emphasizing that in both, general art and sound, the consistency was maybe broken as a stylistic device (see the rather symmetrical appearance of the antagonist).
The protagonist gathers together with his friends to live through his quest. They are confronted with many other small creatures, friendly and hostile alike, throughout their adventure. The draw of the story is mainly driven by the interest about what happens next to the band of troubles. The main antagonist and the story surrounding him is in my perception rather uninteresting.
This game definitely doesn't hold any of the magic of Machinarium. The scenery is way more repetitive, the world in general has less details and the map is confusing.
The puzzles are basically pixel hunting taken to the extreme consequences, you'll just look for your hotspot and pray that is the right sequence. There also some basic drag and drop events and some basic environmental puzzle. The inventory management is close to non existent and you are never explicitly told where to go if you have missed an item; that is pretty annoying since later levels are pretty vast. The minor arcade sequences are also unpolished, but what annoyed me the most is that you can't interact with anything while a cutscene relative to another interaction is ongoing. The uniqueness of the 5 playing characters is basically unuseful since, in the scenes where you need them to act alone, you'll basically select them randomly until you find the correct one.
On the good side, it's likely you'd enjoy the soundtrack and enjoy this game if you are a fan of hidden object games or of Samorost series, which also had a similar bare-bones structure. The game has also a length that justifies the pricetag and some extra beast catalogue that collects all the creatures you've run into; some require going back to some places so that may hold a minor replay value.
Personally, a huge disappointment, especially knowing what this studio would be capable of.
Since the release of the Samorost series and Machinarium, Amanita Design held a special place in my hear for being able to convey a profoundly sensible experience without relying on dialogue. This made their game appealing on a totally different level. Like many, my expectations for Botanicula were consequently very high and all that big tree idea was very compelling until... I actually played the game. To give credit where credit is due: you can feel that there's been an incredible effort to make the game look alive; literally, every pixel seems to be animated by a life of it's own and all of which is enclosed in a rich sonic ambiance that soothes the mind. But the greatness ends there. Your interactions with this rich and beautiful world are as tantalizing as they are passive. There is a reason why games have puzzles or challenging opponents for when you try to defeat them, you are engaged with the game and sadly, this is where Botanicula fails completely. The "puzzles" are so simplistic and naive that you could have solved them by clicking at random on anything that moves or shines (in no way can they be compared to what Machinarium had to offer). Not only the puzzles are simplistic and naive, there's not even enough content to the game to keep you occupied more than 2 or 3 hours. One could argue that a game does not need to have a challenging game-play to be fun; citing The Walking Dead for instance but The Walking Dead is a whole different story for, to the point, it has an amazing story and a very peculiar way to drag you into it while Botanicula simply has no story, nada. Aside from the ever changing animations, I really can't see what is this game's appeal. Fortunately, Amanita makes no false claim about this game as they call it a "toy-game" (what more unfortunate though, is that they intend to make Samorost 3 a toy-game too!). To be fair, perhaps I'm not the right audience for this game; I like a lot of stuff that's somewhat intended for children (any Hayao Miyazaki's movies for instance) but perhaps this is a game that really is for children. In brief, if you're the kind of person that deeply enjoyed the Myst series, or something like Portal, run away like hell. If on the other hand you loved Samorost I and II, maybe you'll like this game and if you loved Machinarium, just know that this is NO Machinarium at all.