Format: 360, PC (version tested)
Release: Out now
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Vitamin G Studios

Float around the caverns of The Undergarden and the barren rocks bloom into life, glowing fronds sprout from crevices and fruits bulge from the stems of newly unfurled trees. The comparisons to Flower are quick to come, and, certainly it adopts both that game’s idea of xen transformation and its gentle notions of challenge. The structure and the shape of the game, meanwhile, finds a closer ancestor in Mekensleep's Soul Bubbles - a 2D side-scrolling DS game in which a pixie-like creature wafted through chambers to the thrum of distant drums and soothing ambient sounds. Light physics puzzles forced notional rumination, and hidden areas concealed secrets for the completists. So, too in The Undergarden - except, if anything, it further unshackles the player from challenge, teasing the distinction between meditative and mindless.



In as much as there’s a rigidly defined purpose at all, the player moves from one end of a level to the other, bringing as much flora into bloom as possible. Your pixie must first collect pollen - bumping into a green gourd, which spurts the stuff into the air. Then, by simply passing close to a seedling, it will sprout to life. The fruit from certain plants can then be collected - holding down right mouse button will tether you to nearby objects - and deposited elsewhere to solve puzzles. Heavy fruits push buttons down. Floating fruits push buttons up. Exploding fruits explode. Slowly, oh so very slowly, the challenge in this increases, with winds that buffet you and glowing pods that cause you to drop objects upon collision. Later, there are timing puzzles, whereby you need to choose the height from which to drop an exploding fruit, such that it detonates at the right spot.

The only puzzles that you could call taxing, however, are those which invite you to fail before you realise what the puzzle actually is. On a few occasions, tricked into leaving our brain on idle, eyes barely focused on the screen, we stumbled into an environment only to cause irrevocable damage to it, preventing us from reaching a collectible. A do-over isn’t easily obtained. You have to play through all the tiers of a given level, return to the hub and then play it through again. Similarly, if you quit during play (or the game crashes to the desktop, as we repeatedly experienced) then it doesn’t save progress within a level. Though these aren’t epic journeys, they are more than long enough for this to be an annoyance.



The Undergarden doesn’t offer the most stimulating of conundrums, then, and relies very heavily on its pleasant ambiance to mitigate actual boredom. To a large part it succeeds: this is a beautiful game, in both look and sound. Fellow pixies can be found around the environment playing instruments - tether yourself to one and cart them around, and the plants pulsate with iridescence, the musicians' contributions building into the overall rhythm of the world, and intertwining with the drums or flutes of the others you find.

This charm keeps the game in the black, but only just - the PC control scheme is clumsy (and, in fact, the code we have doesn’t even deign to have a complete set of instructions for the platform’s controls) and some of the movement required is finicky, with sticky collision catching your pixie’s ankles. What The Undergarden offers is an appealing kernel - a journey of hallucinatory colour and restful pace - but for all its serene, green-fingered charm, its few ideas never quite come into blossom. [6]