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<\/a><\/p>\nWhy should you play it?<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n\n\u2022 Zen Garden:<\/strong> Do you find relaxation in gardening? Do you like clickers? Then this is the game for you. Plantera<\/em> is a stress-killing game that involves very little interaction and yet somehow manages to become meditatively addictive. The objective is simple: grow a garden and make fat stacks of cash in the form of gold coins to then reinvest into expanding the garden until it stretches far beyond the left and right boundaries of the screen. As plants and trees grow, they cyclically produce fruits and veggies, which can be manually gathered via rapid-fire mouse clicks, or you can kick back and act as garden supervisor, watching as little blue puffball dudes do all the labor for you. The garden can also be populated with farm animals, like chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep, to produce other resources, all varying in gold value. On the flipside, hostile critters, like bunnies, wolves, birds, and moles, will try to creep into the garden and steal your crop or chase your animals. But no worries–like everything in the game they’re easily shooed off with a click. While all of this is going on, you gain experience and eventually level up to receive new types of plants and other rewards. There’s no real point or end goal, but man is there something about clickers that tickles that obsessive gamer desire to collect things and level up.<\/p>\n\u2022 Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy:<\/strong> If brainlessly mouse-clicking a thousand times a minute doesn’t put you in a total state of Zen bliss, the game’s colorful, whimsical art style and adorable characters should help to brighten the mood. Sure, the single looping music track can be almost too<\/em> cheery, to the point of becoming almost obnoxious after gleefully bobbing your head to it for the first hour. However, that just gives you the excuse to mute the audio and create a playlist of your favorite tunes to Zen garden out to. Pharrell’s “Happy” would be a fitting choice. Or maybe go with some Pantera, if that’s what helps you relax.<\/p>\n\u2022 Persistent Progression:<\/strong> Another neat thing about this game–and clickers in general–is the way your garden continues to live on in persistence after you’ve quit. While you’re away, the blue puffball dudes will continue to toil away like little worker bees. Upon your return, a prompt will inform you of how much money was made in your absence, and you may even be rewarded with a level-up. More expensive upgrades are available to help boost this persistent progression, including fertilizer to increase the gold value for all crops, guard dogs to fend off critters when you aren’t around to click them, and an increase to the number of hours the workers will spend on the job. Every time you return to the garden is like opening a little gaming present. How much money did I earn? Did I get enough to level up? Am I closer to earning a new achievement?<\/ol>\nParting Thoughts:<\/strong><\/font> Plantera<\/em> is a fun little time-waster of a game to casually play here and there between other, more sophisticated experiences. Its clicker mechanics are exceedingly simple and, after level 20, the sense of reward begins to dissipate fairly quickly as the upgrades menu runs out of new types of plants to unlock. So you’ll probably switch from playing an hour at a time for the first session or two to shorter five to ten minute spurts. But that’s the appeal of the game–and the genre. Even if there is no grand payoff to ultimately look forward to, there is this compulsive allure and soothing sense of gratification that pulls you back to check on your garden and watch the gold count pile up, daily if not hourly.<\/p>\n
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