When you’re playing the game, you don’t decide the paths traced by the vegetation. It works on players by inviting them to rehearse an activity that’s less about directly manipulating environments than about sparking change in them. Cloud Gardens speaks to ecological crisis without speaking about it. It doesn’t lament the environmental catastrophe wrought by the human species, nor does it preach the gospel of a green new Earth, but it’s still more than a good way to waste away the hours. Provided by Thomas van den BergĬloud Gardens doesn’t have a message. The planet spins in its orbit around the sun. There’s no hope, not if hope means the persistence of civilization, yet life goes on. It’s an exercise in abandoning the framework of human agency, in chucking out stories in which heroic humans save the day. Instead, it invites meditation, peaceful absorption in its voxel landscapes and airy music. Yet Cloud Gardens never explicitly draws attention to environmental devastation. Its ruins and rubble and the pointed absence of human characters allude to ecological crisis. Which doesn’t mean Cloud Gardens is about climate change, or ecological crisis, or the Anthropocene, or pollution. I tend to agree with Mark Bould when he argues in The Anthropocene Unconscious that in the present, art and culture can’t help but speak to climate change: ecological crisis is so all-encompassing that it enters into every novel, poem, film, song, or videogame, like a specter for which no exorcism has been invented. It’s tempting to interpret Cloud Gardens as a response to ecological crisis, to climate change and all it portends. What stories does a vine leave behind as it creeps across the rusted hulk of a bus? The stories it tells are the ones players make, the paths traced out by the plants as they climb over the ruins. Cloud Gardens doesn’t explain this absence it’s not a narrative game, not in the traditional sense. Life goes on, for the birds and the plants, not for humans. There’s no hope for a cure, no prospect of rebuilding civilization. You can “beat” a level of Cloud Gardens, but there’s no escaping its apocalypse. Plant your garden well enough and seeds will form, allowing you to sow even more vegetation in a post-apocalyptic loop of botanical splendor. The trick lies in proximity and contiguity, in planting a seed where it might easily climb from an artifact to its neighbor. A vine might tumble effortlessly down a street sign, a shrub erupts with rough grace from a discarded tire. Each level of the campaign asks you to achieve a certain threshold of greenery by strategically placing a limited number of seeds, as well as everyday objects like shopping carts or street signs.
#Cloud gardens series#
The game presents its post-apocalyptic world in a series of isometric dioramas, each one brimming with rubble and refuse, broken things waiting to be taken over by plant life.
#Cloud gardens simulator#
It’s Stardew Valley after human extinction, Farming Simulator in the ruins of capitalism.
#Cloud gardens Pc#
This is Cloud Gardens, released on PC and Xbox in 2021, developed by Thomas van den Berg (also known as noio, best known for designing the Kingdom series of side-scrolling strategy games).Ĭloud Gardens is a quiet, post-apocalyptic gardening sim. A zig zag of thorny shrubs erupt from the ground. They loiter their heads swivel in search of food.
A bird lands on the fence, then another one. Only broken pavement, a rusty chain-link fence, a shopping cart warped out of shape, and a tangle of thick green vines. Or, imagine no one, not a human in sight. They’re finally voting on a name for this drifting remainder of civilization. Today, everyone’s heading to the largest ship, the colony’s social hub.
The larger boats, once the toys of hedge fund managers, are now communal vessels: one’s a daycare, filled with the sounds of children playing another’s a library, its decks crammed with books, magazines, and maps. The sails were long ago stripped from the masts, repurposed as tethers to tie the boats together. Imagine a flotilla of sailboats, bobbing on the Atlantic Ocean. So much lost to the fires and earthquakes, twin cataclysms of an abandoned Earth. As if a meat-filled stomach might make you too drowsy to remember the times before. There’s a vegetable garden in the back, a few goats tied to a makeshift wooden fence, their flesh reserved for feast days. Rich odors of chard and parsnips waft from pots and pans over kerosene stoves.
#Cloud gardens windows#
Imagine the steel outline of a local bank, glass windows and doors smudged with mud and moss.