Cloud Gardens seeks to start a dialogue between game and player about nature and the built environment. It’s a conversation I don’t really want to butt in on here, because I’ve played the game and had the privilege of thinking my own way through it, and I shouldn’t rob anyone of that. But there’s something else here that I love, so I will gush briefly and incoherently instead.
This is one of those diorama games. You start each level with a floating chunk of real estate – a tumbledown road or the skeletal rig for urban signage. Then you apply little nubbins of plants to the diorama and watch them grow. The aim is to reach a certain level of coverage, and you can encourage plants to grow further by chucking in extra items that you’re given – street signs, a stack of tyres, a shopping trolley perhaps, or a couple of empty bottles.
I was enjoying this for a few levels and having one of those dreamy, ruminative days that a diorama game can hand you. But then I unlocked a new kind of plant to grow – my third or maybe fourth. And everything changed.
Monstera. The Swiss cheese plant. The ‘seventies plant. The ‘Sorry, the Vice President is out shopping for water beds right now can I put you on hold’ plant. This is not just the office plant par excellence. (Using phrases like ‘par excellence’ is the sort of Abigail’s Party stuff that goes down whenever Monsteras are invoked; do you like Demis Roussos?) Oh no. It’s the office plant from the days in which everyone in the office There is something about toxic clouds of grit drifting through the gappy leaves of a good Monstera that reminds me that I was born in the late ‘seventies and lived my formative years to the sound of (Don’t Fear) The Reaper coming from the 8-track of my mum’s Mazda.
I digress. Monsteras are those plants with the wide leaves with holes in them. They’re beauties – right from the tropical forests where those holes, I have been told, allow light to travel into the depths and the lower branches. These plants need a good moss pole if you’re going to try them in your house, and you should because, so long as you get a nice bit of (indirect?) sunlight, they will do you proud.