GROW: bigger and better3 min read

You have been provided with an egg, an iron tube, a cube, an orange ball, an helix and half a dozen more assorted items, apparently at random. Nothing really special. Right?

Wrong!

If all these things are put together according to the rules of GROW, there is no saying what can come out of them. Created by eyezmaze in remote 2002, this simple puzzle follows just one rule: drag the objects towards the center of the red ball, and watch the results.

At first, not much seems to happen. Our chosen material is just sitting there, on a more or less random spot on the screen and that’s it. But as we keep adding elements, they start influencing each other and interacting, growing (hence the title) and mutating shape, always with a satisfying LEVEL UP popping over them. Believe me when I say the final result really is unpredictable.

The aim of the game is to have all elements on their maximum growth level, simply deducting the correct order based on the interaction between them. Many times, though, there are several dead ends, often as interesting as the final result.

GROW, in fact, is not just one game, but an entire series of about a dozen titles. Throughout the years the author had fun in toying with the formula, with many different results and even crossing it over other genres, as in the great GROW Rpg.

Unlike the usual role playing games, we are not controlling the main character, rather we will have to grow a world rich in resources to take and challenges to face, so that our hero can become strong enough to defeat the evil demon on the top of the screen.

Yet there are some down flaws, perfectly understandable considered all titles are developed by the same one person. The author tries his best in inserting an appropriate soundtrack, often with good results; however the tracks soon become repetitive, or change suddendly without a clear reason. On the design side, since this gameplay is focused on trial and error, we would often like to retry more immediately, not having to go through all the animation so that we can get to the desired point just to change the order of two items.

Trial and error is the very soul of these games, and the result is really peculiar: it’s an experience of deep exploration regardless of the space. Even though we have the whole game world in front of us all of the time, GROW manages to drive the attention away from the exploration of places and towards the exploration of possibilities.

On a last note, my advice is to examine thoroughly the eyezmaze blog, full of interesting titles and concepts, many of which are indeed spawned by this series. Remarkable is Dwarf Complete, a top-down exploration puzzle also available on iOS and set in the world of LineageII.