Category: The SBRI

Over the weekend, I found a little time between studying and watching the entire second season of Attack on Titan to play a bit more of Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden. And let me tell you, the second chapter was not substantially more exciting than the first.

The gameplay mechanics have grown slightly more complex, without any hope that some of the things that need constant clicking will start to click themselves. First of all, I was given a meat grinder. The idea is that you can pluck organs off a tree before they’re ripe to grind them into mincemeat. It seemed completely arbitrary and pointless up until the point where I learned how to make “excellent” organs. This is accomplished by letting a single organ grow on a tree while chucking any others that sprout into the grinder. So essentially, the grinder is a way of giving you something back for all those perfectly good organs you’re throwing away in hopes of cultivating one really good one.

The catalog hasn’t expanded appreciably yet. In addition to the frogs, I can now purchase moles and woodpeckers. The moles make organs sprout on trees faster (but don’t speed up the ripening process) and the woodpeckers will make the meat grinder run faster. This is all well and good, but the animals get distracted from their jobs very quickly, so once you have a decent sized stable of animals, you’re constantly clicking around to get them back to work. It’s more than a little annoying.

I was also given a third tree to babysit, this new one growing stomachs. It was at this point that I decided that trying to keep all three trees going at once was too much of a pain, and opted to just focus on one or two at a time. It seems like the “grow X number of Y organ” and “get tree Z to level Q” quests just repeat forever with higher numbers, so the best course of action seems to be to just focus on whatever the active story quest is. Sure, you can run the other quests over and over to earn more cash, but there isn’t anything really worth buying yet at this point in the game.

As far as the story goes, it’s mostly just been more creepy customers. One was a little girl who wanted an organ to make her cat talk. Irene told her that one of these magical soul-giving organs can only be put into something that isn’t alive, so the girl left, killed her cat, and then brought it back with the same request. Good lord! I think there was someone else who made a strong impression on me at the time, but I guess it wasn’t that strong in reality, because I’ve completely forgotten. Also there was a mysterious lady in black who came in and the whole screen turned dark, but not much happened with her yet.

So where is this story going? I have no idea. I really just hope that something happens with the gameplay to keep it from getting any more annoying. There is still room for more trees/machines/whatever, and I don’t much care for the idea of having even more clickable things to babysit. In fact, I might just sell all the stupid animals…

Most of the time if I’m writing a review for a game, I will start it while I’m in the middle of the game, and then change the review text as I go along. Sometimes the things that I write change quite a lot over that time, sometimes my initial impressions are spot-on and nothing changes at all.

This time, I’d like to keep more of a play diary. Our game in question is Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden. This was a random recommendation from Steam, which I clicked on and decided to put on my wish list, because it was a clicker game that looked a little unhinged. Not long after, it went on sale for a paltry $3.50, so I snapped that puppy up and jumped right in.

Now that the groundwork is laid, let’s dig into the game itself. Hopefully it’s interesting enough to justify using this format.

FMN:MOG opens with a bunch of dialogue, mostly out-of-context stuff that will ostensibly make more sense later. Then you’re given your role: as the assistant in a plant nursery. Only, the plants here grow magical organs instead of fruit or flowers. So far, we’ve learned that putting one of these organs in an inanimate object will give it life, but not a real soul, and that the organs come in differing qualities. Most of the customers have been various degrees of shady, and even your boss seems to have a questionable background.

It’s important to note that this game is from a Japanese developer (CAVYHOUSE), and it’s got an anime feel to it that isn’t overpowering, but is definitely perceptible. From the not-quite-perfect localization to the fact that your character addresses her boss as “master,” it’s clear that this isn’t originally from the Western world. I feel like I was going somewhere with this paragraph, but I’ve completely forgotten where that was. Oh well.

Gameplay starts off simple: water the tree, and it will grow kidneys. Pluck the kidneys and ship them to earn cash. The tree stores so much water, which is used up as kidneys grow, and the watering can will slowly refill over time. You can level up the tree by plucking kidneys, and the watering can levels up as you use it. Eventually you’re given a store, but the only item I can buy so far is a frog. Frogs speed up your watering can’s refill speed, but they lack focus and you’ll have to click on them every few seconds to get them back to work.

In this first session, I’ve completed Chapter One, which ended on a scene of the nursery owner (Irene) and a mysterious friend talking about going on a trip together, leaving me to run the plant nursery alone. I have a nagging feeling that my character may have been brought to life by one of the same magical organs that she is harvesting. Chapter Two also gave me a second tree that blooms hearts, so now there’s twice as much maintenance to take care of and my watering can does not fill nearly fast enough to keep up, even with three frogs buffing it.

So far, it’s been just a matter of juggling fruits, water, and frogs until the door lights up and you’re shown the next story scene. As your things level up and you collect kidneys, you’ll complete missions that give you more cash. It’s a slightly more complicated cycle than most clickers I’ve played, and most other clickers would have given you an option to automate the process by now (which turns them from clicker game into idle game). I suppose I’ll just have to keep playing to see how both the story and gameplay unfold.