Not to brag but I have a pear tree at the moment that is really something. It must be twenty feet tall, for one thing, and the pears are these fat golden gems that hang from its spongy boughs. The pear, I remember reading in The Observer about fifteen years ago, is a fruit whose time has come. Fifteen years means it’s probably come and gone by now, but still: that pear tree of mine. Sometimes it’s nice to get off the motorbike I use when gardening, put down my magic trowel and just take it in. I grew that!
Grow a Garden is everywhere on Roblox at the moment, melting servers and sending player counts through the roof. I have been intrigued by this, but not quite intrigued enough to get a Roblox account. But there’s a clone of it on Fortnite now. Of course there is. These games trade modes and ideas back and forth endlessly. So yesterday I dropped into Go Garden to see what the game’s about.
You start with a few flower beds in an arena that’s shared with a few other players. It’s like you’ve all dropped in to the Fortnite Allotments together. You plant seeds that grow at a variety of speeds depending on what they are. You harvest the seeds and sell them and you then use the money to buy more seeds that you sell for more money and on it goes. Oh, and because it’s Fortnite, you can do most of this while bombing around on a motorbike.
There are wrinkles, which are still announcing themselves. Some plants are one and done: you plant a tulip, you get one tulip and you pick it and sell it and then get on with your life. Others, like strawberries, leave you with plants that produce more and more of the things. Different weather conditions lead to different mutations in plants, which I assume makes them more valuable. You can buy sprinklers and whatnot to speed everything along, and there’s a Piranha Plant knock-off who you can go and chat to now and then. They’ll dispatch you to grow very specific plants in order to get a little bonus gift.