Indie games have the advantage of trying new ideas and Seedlings harnesses that power with its visual style and type of gameplay. The game sees you play as a sentient seed wandering through the New Zealand forests, seemingly trying to survive or escape. The beauty is that the entire thing is designed around actual photos and video footage of the New Zealand forest land and so you can’t ask for a more realistic backdrop!
It was the visual style that drew me to Seedlings initially. The blend of layered photos allows you to traverse trees and soil as you roll around, but things can move too. Occasionally a bird might appear, or there is a section where you need to cross a stream and it integrates real video footage into the mix. It’s not quite on par with Idea, which used drone footage of a village to traverse the entire game, but the sparse use of FMV integration into your movement also gave a wow factor. The majority of the game takes place in the forest so except a lot of dark green and brown, but occasionally some beautiful rock formations or streams appear to break up the visual darkness.
The gameplay is an interesting mix of physics puzzling and 2D platforming. As the seed, all you can do is roll about. However this seed acts like a virus looking for a host and spread across the forest are various pieces of tree bark or mutated mushroom growths that you can roll into and take control of. Each type of host can do something different such a jump or crawl along walls. All of them can spit you out though and you trigger this like a 2D old school gold game. Press and hold a button and an arc appears that will get longer and higher as the power increases and then you take your shot.
Almost all the puzzles in Seedlings follow the same idea. Find the host, move them into position and shoot the seed to the next area. As the game progresses, more hosts, platforms or movable platforming elements are added in such as vines to swing on or logs to move, but the puzzle idea remains the same. I didn’t really get stuck with Seedlings during its short runtime, but the last big puzzle took me a while to chain everything up correctly. I really enjoyed this puzzle format as it was satisfying to get it right and move on. That said, if you don’t click with this as a puzzle loop, the game doesn’t switch it up much so you might struggle with the game as a whole.
Seedlings is a brief experience, clocking in at around 90 minutes to 2 hours to complete. Some optional collectables can add maybe another half hour on top but oddly, Seedlings felt like more than the sum of its parts. It felt unique – like a game I hadn’t experienced before – and that for me speaks volumes about how much I enjoyed and revelled in the experience. When you break down the fundamentals of what Seedlings offers, its quite basic. Yet I was engrossed from start to end and as the story unfolded, I couldn’t wait to see how it all panned out. This is the very definition of a hidden gem in game and I’d recommend it as my obscure platforming leftfield recommendation of 2023.
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