Green thumbsticks.
Cloud Gardens places itself in the rapidly expanding game genre “chill”. It ticks the critical boxes: open-ended, low-pressure gameplay; wistful ambient music; and graphics in colours muted enough and pixels chunky enough not to overcommit to anything. This sort of thing can be a bit meandering, but Noio has installed some clever guide rails around its post-apocalyptic playground to keep it moving along at just the pace you want.
First, the main game comprises compact dioramas presented in sequence, each needing to be completed to move to the next. This keeps things tight, with no sprawling convolutions to get your head around. Second, the items you can place and seeds you can plant in these scenes are labelled and categorised and stored in your catalogue for future use. This is not a collectathon or compare-the-stats scenario – things just get collected as you encounter them, giving a suggestion of progress.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
