Grow Home is coming to PS4 on September 1st. Yay! Even better, you get to decide if it’s going to be free for all Playstation Plus members as we’re featured in the new “Vote to Play” campaign. We’d love your vote, and we’re excited to know what you think of it!
Developing the game has been a real adventure for us. It actually started as an experiment in procedural animation, but even in the early stages we could see a unique charm and personality coming from the way our character moved. The more we tinkered, the more we felt compelled to try and build a game around it.
At Reflections, we’re used to working on big team, big budget, high-profile titles. Creating a smaller game like this was very new to us, so we had to take a different approach. A tiny team of eight set about building a game we could share with Ubisoft staff around the world — we wanted to prove that we had something fun instead of promise it. The game spread internally, quickly reaching the desktops of top management who jumped on board giving us the go-ahead to officially launch it.
Grow Home is the story of BUD, a Botanical Utility Droid sent on a quest across the galaxy to seek out a new species of flora to help oxygenate his home world. He finds the perfect specimen in the Star Plant. BUD’s mission is to grow it to maturity and harvest the seeds it produces, resulting in a towering two-kilometer-high bridge from the ground to his space ship. Along the way you’ll explore floating islands, encounter strange plants and unusual animals. The Star Plant is a living thing, so growing and steering it is quite a wild ride. The shape it takes is all up to you, as you grow your own playground in the sky.
Using BUD’s hands, you’ll push, pull, and grab onto objects, as well as climb. Grabbing with the left and right trigger buttons brings a unique feel to how you interact with the world, especially the climbing which can be very physical and perilous — you get a real sense of vertigo and you’re acutely aware of the long drop below you!
As you make your way toward the sky, you’ll discover other ways of getting around faster. That’s where discoveries like the teleportation pads, bouncing leaves, flower parachutes and leaf glider come in. It might be safer to grow and climb everywhere, but once you have a glider or parachute to use if you fall then you’ll begin to push yourself to take bigger and bolder risks — jumping, bouncing, gliding, and falling with confidence.
We wanted to challenge how we make games at Ubisoft Reflections. Grow Home has given us a chance to experiment on a much smaller scale than we’re used to. It’s a project born out of our passion for games and a determination to do things differently. We feel we’ve created a beautiful and intriguing world that invites you to climb that next ledge and see what new surprises you’ll find. We hope you enjoy the adventure!
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