The world of Cloud Gardens is comprised mostly of civilization’s remains. Condemned buildings erode, bones of rusted rebar jut out of broken bridges, abandoned highway signs are engulfed in renegade vines. There is a gentleness to this, this world where people aren’t around anymore and nothing creaks, but where life is eager to bounce back as long as conditions are just right. You are asked first to collect a seed.
How it starts.
Cloud Gardens is a game about covering the landscape with plant life. Collect seeds, and use and arrange the rubbish and ruin around you to make plants grow. In the world of Cloud Gardens, littering is a restorative act, providing props that flora can conquer. Each level is a different patch of metropolitan dilapidation, and your objective each time is to fill it with life and beauty.
Cloud Gardens is a bit of a genre-bender—you can call it a gardening simulator, but you can also call it a puzzle game. It takes a bit of lateral thinking to manipulate your surroundings, in order to encourage the flourishing of different flowers and grasses.
I downloaded this game from Itch (here!) and it’s compatible to run on a Mac OS. My copy’s a little buggy, but I spent a leisurely amount of time with it. Freedom of expression is built into the game. Restoring the landscape feels like a little art project, and there are a million ways to decorate a little patch of concrete. Beautiful scoring by Amos Roddy and M. Robertson textures your experience of the world, and the ambience is on par with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which really set the bar for me in terms of game sound design. The graphics are lush, and each pixel feels like a thoughtful brush stroke.
The washed background hues REALLY do it for me, I gotta tell ya
I’m a big fan of the trope of urban landscapes overrun by rampant growth. There’s something really transfixing about something as persistent and patient as vines reclaiming whole edifices of concrete, how easily a seed can turn desolation into spaciousness. So Cloud Gardens scratched that specific itch for me.
Did y’all ever get into terrariums? Pre-COVID, I had a brief phase with terrariums. Just one of those things where you see something cool, pick up the hobby, see if it works for you. (This coming 2023, I hope to do the same with pottery.) So I took a class at TERRA BOMBA and learned about like, picking the glass container, laying the stratum of soil, then pebbles, then cozying the roots of the plant in the soil, all that. The one I made during the class was alright, so I tried making one on my own, see if I could go into a zen place and get meditative and lose myself in an activity that absolutely requires you to be delicate. I’m always told I’m heavy-handed, I close the door too hard, I type too loud, my sense of touch lacks measurement.
I worked hard on that little project, but rot finds a way. There’s a unique sadness to watching something meant to function self-sustainably, as its own ecosystem, wilt inside a prison of glass. So I don’t do that anymore. I am no druid. I’ve been meaning to get back into terrariums again just as a customer—I want that beauty in my life, even though it’s not handmade by me, even if it’s not evidence of a skill I possess. I don’t think I learned any other pivotal lessons from that time, but I’ve lived a little more life since then, trying things out and being mediocre at them, feeling like a beginner at a bunch of shit. (Watch out, pottery!!!)
The procedural rhetoric of Cloud Gardens, I think, invites players to practice patience and develop a discerning eye, specifically in settings of ruin. There are certain schools of leftist thought that assume a successful revolution is impossible and futile, and that all theory and strategy must be funnelled into the plan B of rebuilding when the dust of ruin has settled. In Cloud Gardens, there is no human life present—watchful birds land on broken streetlights to observe your work, germs do their little chthonic duties, things bloom. But from what I’ve seen, not even the game tells you that you play a person. Either you’re the last human being on Earth, or some undefined force that keeps the cycle running. The wind! I don’t know!
It’s hard to say which hard and soft skills from Cloud Gardens transferred IRL for me, but I’ll say this. Each level gives you different props of detritus to help facilitate plant growth—road signs, garbage bins, traffic cones, etcetera. On levels where I get lawn chairs or car seats, what I’ll do is I’ll try to make a view full of flowers and grasses, and save one spot for the lawn chairs, and pretend they’ll be inhabited by whatever bipedal life finds them. I’m doing this thing now, where I try to save a place for people in my life, or even carve out new room for people that were always there. Life is eager to bounce back, as long as conditions are just right.
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12/31/22 - Cloud Gardens
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Hello! I’d like to recommend a game.
The world of Cloud Gardens is comprised mostly of civilization’s remains. Condemned buildings erode, bones of rusted rebar jut out of broken bridges, abandoned highway signs are engulfed in renegade vines. There is a gentleness to this, this world where people aren’t around anymore and nothing creaks, but where life is eager to bounce back as long as conditions are just right. You are asked first to collect a seed.
Cloud Gardens is a game about covering the landscape with plant life. Collect seeds, and use and arrange the rubbish and ruin around you to make plants grow. In the world of Cloud Gardens, littering is a restorative act, providing props that flora can conquer. Each level is a different patch of metropolitan dilapidation, and your objective each time is to fill it with life and beauty.
Cloud Gardens is a bit of a genre-bender—you can call it a gardening simulator, but you can also call it a puzzle game. It takes a bit of lateral thinking to manipulate your surroundings, in order to encourage the flourishing of different flowers and grasses.
I downloaded this game from Itch (here!) and it’s compatible to run on a Mac OS. My copy’s a little buggy, but I spent a leisurely amount of time with it. Freedom of expression is built into the game. Restoring the landscape feels like a little art project, and there are a million ways to decorate a little patch of concrete. Beautiful scoring by Amos Roddy and M. Robertson textures your experience of the world, and the ambience is on par with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which really set the bar for me in terms of game sound design. The graphics are lush, and each pixel feels like a thoughtful brush stroke.
I’m a big fan of the trope of urban landscapes overrun by rampant growth. There’s something really transfixing about something as persistent and patient as vines reclaiming whole edifices of concrete, how easily a seed can turn desolation into spaciousness. So Cloud Gardens scratched that specific itch for me.
Did y’all ever get into terrariums? Pre-COVID, I had a brief phase with terrariums. Just one of those things where you see something cool, pick up the hobby, see if it works for you. (This coming 2023, I hope to do the same with pottery.) So I took a class at TERRA BOMBA and learned about like, picking the glass container, laying the stratum of soil, then pebbles, then cozying the roots of the plant in the soil, all that. The one I made during the class was alright, so I tried making one on my own, see if I could go into a zen place and get meditative and lose myself in an activity that absolutely requires you to be delicate. I’m always told I’m heavy-handed, I close the door too hard, I type too loud, my sense of touch lacks measurement.
I worked hard on that little project, but rot finds a way. There’s a unique sadness to watching something meant to function self-sustainably, as its own ecosystem, wilt inside a prison of glass. So I don’t do that anymore. I am no druid. I’ve been meaning to get back into terrariums again just as a customer—I want that beauty in my life, even though it’s not handmade by me, even if it’s not evidence of a skill I possess. I don’t think I learned any other pivotal lessons from that time, but I’ve lived a little more life since then, trying things out and being mediocre at them, feeling like a beginner at a bunch of shit. (Watch out, pottery!!!)
The procedural rhetoric of Cloud Gardens, I think, invites players to practice patience and develop a discerning eye, specifically in settings of ruin. There are certain schools of leftist thought that assume a successful revolution is impossible and futile, and that all theory and strategy must be funnelled into the plan B of rebuilding when the dust of ruin has settled. In Cloud Gardens, there is no human life present—watchful birds land on broken streetlights to observe your work, germs do their little chthonic duties, things bloom. But from what I’ve seen, not even the game tells you that you play a person. Either you’re the last human being on Earth, or some undefined force that keeps the cycle running. The wind! I don’t know!
It’s hard to say which hard and soft skills from Cloud Gardens transferred IRL for me, but I’ll say this. Each level gives you different props of detritus to help facilitate plant growth—road signs, garbage bins, traffic cones, etcetera. On levels where I get lawn chairs or car seats, what I’ll do is I’ll try to make a view full of flowers and grasses, and save one spot for the lawn chairs, and pretend they’ll be inhabited by whatever bipedal life finds them. I’m doing this thing now, where I try to save a place for people in my life, or even carve out new room for people that were always there. Life is eager to bounce back, as long as conditions are just right.