What a sweetheart of a game. A happy, relaxing, challenging but not punishing game that firmly adheres to the school of "even failing should be fun."

Hiding underneath the cutesy and cheerful surface is some solid game design. Simple and polished, providing you with various ways to achieve your objectives, giving you clear goals, never overloading you.

The game is very physical. (Some are even calling it sexual, and while I see where they're coming from I can also see some obsessions here.) What I mean by physical is that it all has to do with how you interact with this little alien world with your robot body, and how you grow this giant plant, guiding offshoot after offshoot, creating bridges and walkways.

As you grow your way up back to your spaceship, the game gives you a very simple and immediate way to see your progess in the game, by just looking at how much you've grown the plant. It's so clever, so... simple, again.

And let's talk about the sound design. The giant plant sings like a whale. Trees sway and tinkle like wind chimes. Cacti and bushes rattle like bean-filled toys. I found around half the game's secrets just by listening to the tell-tale sounds they emit. No wonder there's no music except in the menus; sound is a very important and well developed element.

At first you have to rely on your climbing, trampolining, and balancing skills to navigate the world you're building. As you progress and unlock more abilities, you feel more in control, and you have more options to get everywhere as fast or as slow as you want. The game's always relaxing, but it still manages to make you feel like you're improving and gaining more control. By the time you near the end, you're the master of your environment.

No game is perfect - this one is pretty close, but let me mention the things that bugged me. BUD is endearingly clumsy, due to the game's procedural animation that allows you more flexible climbing. But sometimes he's just too unpredictable and loose.
The game tells you when you launch it that a controller is recommended. It works fine with KB&M, but I can see why they recommend a controller: walking BUD around with analog controls allows for way more precision and less accidents. Climbing is easier. Gliding is much more enjoyable.

My other nitpick has to do with the inverted vertical axis when growing a plant shoot or gliding. An option to set that would be welcome, although I admit I got used to it and would probably have a hard time going back. But still, options are nice.

One more thing, it would be nice to have separate save slots. Now that I finished the game, I would like to preserve this "complete" save slot, while also starting a new game.

The character animations in the game may be procedural, but the world isn't. And I like it this way. I like the clever placement of secrets, the carefully designed islands and caves. But at the same time I want more, so I hope the developers release more worlds as DLC. I would be happy to pay for them.

See if you can get all the achievements. I don't usually care much about them, but in this game I have the urge to 100% it, because they are all reasonable and because it's so much fun to play.

An enthusiastic recommendation from me on this one.