Let’s switch gears for a little while here, and steer the conversation away from you-know-which-game. Just for a while. Today I want to write about something completely different. Something called Glittermitten Grove.
This is a cute little resource management-type game where you help a colony of fairies to build themselves a foresty wonderland. The goal of the game is more or less to simply gather enough food to get your fairies through the winter. It’s pretty easy at first, as you only have like three fairies, and they consume roughly 2 food units a season.
Then things get a little more complicated, as more fairies move in. You’ll have to build more panties to hold more food. Since fairies also tire out over time, you’ll need to build houses for them to sleep in. And of course, you need materials from which to construct these buildings, which brings us to possibly the most interesting part of the game: wood.
As in many other video games, and also real life, wood is harvested from trees. Trees will grow on their own over time, and you can chop of bits and pieces of them to collect wood. Branch size and type of tree will dictate how much wood you actually earn. But you can’t just go cutting everything down all willy-nilly. Nope. Trees are also where all of your buildings are constructed, so you have to strike a careful balance between trimming the trees to gain wood, and keeping them large enough to support your fairy colony.
Light also plays a prominent role. Trees need to get sufficient sunlight to stay alive, and a tree that lives in the shadows for too long will wither and die. Your playfield is also dictated by a different light, which is provided by sight orbs. Everything out of the range of these orbs is covered in an impenetrable fog of war. Sight orbs are built using sparkles, which are collected by placing a prism in a tree and letting it absorb sunlight.
Sparkles also fuel magic, which comes in two varieties. There is the Fertilizer spell, which speeds up the growth of a tree. It’s nice that you can target specific parts of the tree, if you should need to add some weight to one side, or just want to grow out some extra branches to chop. There is also a fireworks spell, which is used to dig underground. There, you can find plenty of neat stuff, like crystals and treasure chests that are loaded with resources. I’ve heard there’s even a big secret under there somewhere…
Glittermitten Grove is a much more robust game than it seems at first glance. Having to balance light, trees, resources, and magic all at once is very engaging and a little challenges. I’ve made it through more than one winter with only two or three food bits left. It’s very nice to play a real-time resource management game after years and years of the stupid mobile and mobile-like games that run on a series of timers.
Also nice is that every fairy has a cute/dumb cliché fairy name, like Lavender Twinklebottom or Sprinkles Honeygrape. It’s fun just to look at them all and see which names make you groan the loudest.
I don’t know when or if the game ends, but I do intend to keep playing for a bit. While the gameplay that I’ve seen is robust enough to hold my interest for a while, it does seem like there should be something else to it. Or maybe you just play until you simply can’t keep up with the influx of fairies. I do have hope that something new will unlock eventually, because the game could certainly stand to offer a surprise or two.
Okay, that’s a terrible example, but I thought it was funny.