Botanicula by Amanita Design

Amanita Design is a small video game/art studio that I have been following for a few years now. They make beautiful games that can only really be described as creations of wonder. They use hand drawn art, photography, and immersive sound design to create an environment that invites the player to experience it. While the game mechanics are simple one-click affairs with the occasional puzzle, (which, when using this word in relation to their designs, can mean something as simple as “find the next thing to click on” just as much as “solve this brain teaser”), they require just enough of the player’s thought process to keep them engaged within the environment without being challenging show stoppers . Their game that was the closest to having true puzzles as one would normally think of them, was a small game called Machinarium, which featured a small robot trying to reach his true love after being separated from her. In it, the puzzles required some thought, a piece of paper for notes, and some patience. This new game, Botanicula is not nearly so puzzle heavy, but still gives plenty of reasons to play it through.

What I really wanted to start off saying, but feared it would be too bold of a statement was: everyone should play Botanicula. It is both an art piece and a game, something meant to create more of an experience and atmosphere than to test dexterity and fast thinking. The interface is simple so not to be intrusive, and a one-click-does-everything method means that even those with very little gaming experience can still easily interact with the creation.

The game itself is meant to bring about an emotional connection with the participant and invoke their interest through this emotion rather than trying to hook the participant through the standard gaming tropes of challenge, reward, and overcoming obstacles. While there is an element of those within the game, they are not the key force driving the player forward, but rather act as secondary supports for the atmospheric and emotional connection.

This connection is something that Amanita has done with all their products, and has continued to do here. They create these connections using a number of tools. First off, they paint with broad strokes when it comes to story. There is always an underlying narrative structure to their games, but it is always told through visual cues and a collection of singular events. Instead of having a narrator tell the audience the story, or have the characters speak to each other, they instead use images and basic animations displayed within thought and speech balloons, allowing the viewer to interpret the events within their own culturally pre-developed knowledge base. This allows the developer to forego the expenses of localizing the game before releasing it to other regions, but it also has the added benefit that it makes their game infinitely relatable and the story can surpass the usual restrictions language places on events, thus freeing it from one interpretation.

The other ways that Amanita builds emotional connections is through their sound and art design. In Botanicula the soundscape they create is both whimsical and upbeat. The sounds that each creature makes is not a pre-recorded nature sound from a sound library but created by a vocalist. Thus each hum, buzz and sound of surprise is a spoken onomatopoeia, pulling us back to the memories of young childhood when every sound could be recreated by us during play, whether it was the whirr of a helicopter or the sound of water spraying from a fire hose. The soundtrack itself is surreal mixture of fairy garden notes and joyful clapping of hands and small drums, and might be one of the most cohesive mixes of music and game that I have ever played. It’s a soundtrack that becomes part of the full experience instead of the usual droning sounds punctuated by rare moments of elation that most games seem to relish using.

Art design, as you can most likely gather from earlier, is another of Amanita’s strong points. The mellow, translucent world-scape evokes feelings of freedom, organic life and purity and the creatures that inhabit it are beautiful hand drawn creations that, while usually contrasting with the environments, also complement the world they live in superbly. The creature designs themselves, while all based on insects, fungi, small mammals, and the occasional undersea oddity, are really completely unique creatures that at first appear as if they are just stylized interpretations of the real things until you really look deeper, and see that they are wholly original and alien. 

It is this similarity to the expected while still being entirely unique that makes this game worth experiencing. You want to touch every detail of the world to see if -and how- it will interact with you and the cast of creatures that you lead along your journey. The plight of the creatures you meet and the world they inhabit will become something you care passionately about within just a brief span of time, and by the time the game has wrapped up three hours later, you will feel like you have experienced something that was worth being part of.

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For those interested here is a video to show you what the game looks and sounds like:

Here is a link to Samorost 1, one of their earlier, free to play games to give you a feel for what kind of games the usually create.