The easiest way to determine whether or not you’ll enjoy Plant Tycoon is to answer the following questions: Are you compelled to collect every last coin in a Mario game? Do you obsess over uncovering every hidden secret and powerup? If, when checking a map, you find that you’ve left a room unsearched, do you immediately head for it, even if it’s out of your way? If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, congratulations, you have Gaming OCD and will more than likely adore Plant Tycoon. If you didn’t, then you’ll likely find yourself stifling a yawn before you’ve sold your first jalapa gladiatus.
The ostensible object of Plant Tycoon is to discover the six magical plants of the island Isola by breeding and cross-breeding various forms of flora. You begin with a nursery and basic gardening tools like soil, water, and a seed tray. You’re given your first few seeds which you then nurture to maturity until they can be pollinated for more seeds, which you can collect to grow more plants, or sell for cash. Selling your plants in the nursery earns you money for upgrades like better soil or bug spray, as well as items to spruce up the joint, thus attracting more visitors who are hopefully willing to part with their hard-earned cash.
The real object of Plant Tycoon, at least for those afflicted with Gaming OCD (like me), is to discover each of the 500 different breeds of plant available in the game. Finding some is as simple as buying seeds at the store. Others can be found by applying a dollop of Mutation Liquid to an already-discovered plant. The rest are found by cross-breeding, which consists of dusting one plant with another’s pollen, harvesting the resulting seed, and waiting for the sprout to grow. At first you only have enough money to buy the most common seeds, making cross-breeding the only way to discover the more exotic flowers. Many hybridizations will yield identical results, or simply give you a flower that you’ve already discovered—finding new ones takes a certain amount of methodical organization and planning. Playing this game with an Excel spread sheet is optimal; the bare minimum of a legal pad is a must.
Naturally, not everyone is going to enjoy keeping a ream of notes that would make Gregor Mendel feel like a slacker, and it’s certainly possible to have a good time in Plant Tycoon just growing pretty flowers and using the cash from their sale to upgrade the nursery to its utmost. You’ll probably even discover some of the magical plants this way, accidentally cross breeding the right two parents or buying the right seed at the right time. Such haphazard gameplay grows boring fairly quickly, though, and you’ll more than likely put the game away forever after just an hour or two.
Progression doesn’t just take a serious intellectual and organizational effort, however; it also takes a major time investment. Even playing on the game’s fastest setting, a plant’s progression from potted seed to fully mature bloom takes most of an hour, and there’s not a whole heck of a lot to do during that hour other than wait, or perhaps catch some of the bugs that wander through your nursery. Fortunately, Plant Tycoon keeps going whether you’re actually playing it or not, so you could, for example, tend to your plants in the morning, then check on their progress when you get home from work. You can change the rate at which in-game time progresses to best suit your schedule, including stopping it altogether.
Just like a real garden, Plant Tycoon can be very rewarding for those willing to give it the proper amount of care and attention. Others may find the cycle of planting and selling to be too slow-moving and tedious for their liking, the joy of discovery not enough to counterbalance the game’s slow pace. As for me, I’m off to see what happens when you cross a blazing pear cactus with a mystic orchid.
