Below is an academic one page write-up I completed mere seconds ago for an indie game entitled Blueberry Garden. With a charming and eccentric aesthetic and catchy music, this game is definitely an experiment where the main focus is the player’s attention span.
Blueberry Garden is a Steam game that retails for 5 dollars and won awards at IGF and the Swedish Game Awards, in addition to critical praise on many game sites. Blueberry Garden is a platformer that the player is thrust into with no exposition, no instructions, and no clue as to who you are, where you are, and what this game is about. It is a game about curiosity and wonderment. It is also a game that tests the player’s abilities of discovery and persistence.
The graphics are charming and seem to resemble the sophisticated doodles of an artistic teen. Eccentric yet full of life, creatures such as the blue moose are a joy to watch as they meander about the screen. Visually, this game is very much a simple rendering of a colorful world—ironic because much of the screen is filled with white backgrounds and black lines—that captures an innocent and carefree lifestyle. Save for, of course, the ever-rising water levels that threaten your character with death.
This brings us to the mechanics of the game itself. It functions very much as a platformer should, albeit a bit clunky and difficult to maneuver at times due to tricky collision. Players may also eat different types of fruit scattered throughout the world in order to grant themselves abilities such as the ability to fly for longer periods of time or to change the geometry of the game world. The game further encourages exploration through these fruits, as it is vital to the player to test out each one and understand how it affects the game. The importance of the fruits and their effects are due to the story hidden from the players.
The story is never immediately told to the player; in fact, it’s never told at all. The game encourages the player to discover why they’re there and what they must solve before time and air run out. This is why Blueberry Garden is an experimental game. It experiments not with the controls, but with the manner in which the story is presented to the player. The experiment asks players how much they are willing to play without any expository structure, without any semblance of direction given to them. In this world, the player truly must discover the problem and the solution. The solution, I often found, was easily uncovered long before the problem was ever brought to the player’s attention.
The dramatics of the game change according to the player playing it: for some, there is no story, for others, there is some inkling of a story, and for the last group there is a rather simple story wrapped up in the player’s own exploration, curiosity, failure, and success. Blueberry Garden lightly critiques the platformer genres and other indie games because both genres present their thematics and dramatics at very early stages in the game. In Blueberry Garden, it is extremely possible to never discover the story at all during your first playthrough. Platformers rely on their oftentimes skeletal fiction in order to give players more impetus to play other than the enjoyment experienced during gameplay. The player’s goal is stated at the outset, that the protagonist must rescue a princess or stop an evil maniac from destroying the world. Indie games, on the other hand, are predisposed towards rich, intriguing, and deeply meaningful stories. At times they may not be exposed to the player immediately, but the player knows there is some reason as to why they’re progressing through the game, whether it be via textual hints provided by the game or via art assets hinting at a deeper story soon to be revealed. Blueberry Garden breaks from the norm. It is quite obviously a story-driven game, yet its story is for the player to discover. It experiments with this concept while teasing the player with a tale not yet told. A tale they can only discover if they adventure through every nook of the game world and if their sense of curiosity outlasts their attention span.
This approach may not work for everyone. I read in an IGN review that this game either clicks with you or it doesn’t. Unfortunately, it did not click with me. I enjoy structure and moving storylines, and playing a game with neither available at the outset, or even at all, was difficult for me. The beginning was jarring, my initial curiosity lasted for mere minutes before I became confused and irritated as to why I had not yet discovered what I was supposed to do. In fact, I never beat the game. I wondered around aimlessly, collecting fruits and oversized objects throughout the world, wondering why the water level continued to rise and how I could stop it. Towards the end of my play session, my death imminent, I assumed nothing could stop the onslaught of water and so I allowed it to take my character and my waning will to play. I only discovered through the help of Google what the story of Blueberry Garden was. My slight dislike of the game aside, I do believe it successfully carried out its experiment. Furthermore, it carried it out in an understated manner, a manner that does not expose itself immediately within the gameplay. Initially, players are only concerned if the game clicks with them or if it doesn’t.