![]() ![]() The living map synthesizes information about ancestral mariculture across the Pacific Ocean and describes the work that a number of communities are undertaking to reawaken diverse sea gardens. ![]() Photo by John Harper, courtesy of Simon Fraser University.Ī few years ago, while waiting for a connecting flight at Houston Airport, the Sea Around Us PI Daniel Pauly challenged Simon Fraser University resource & environmental management professor Anne Salomon to put clam gardens in a global context by mapping them along with similar Indigenous maricultural innovations around the world.Īt the time, Salomon said “challenge accepted” and what emerged from that casual conversation on the way to a scientific symposium became an interactive web-based story map titled ‘ Sea Gardens Across the Pacific.’ I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a fun game somewhere in there, but that it was stuck in a pool of molasses, and I just wasn’t feeling it enough to struggle through.Clam garden in the Broughton Archipelago, British Columbia, Canada. While there wasn’t anything I hated about Garden Story, there just wasn’t anything that made me really want to keep playing either. This just felt like it was poorly designed. When a game doesn’t give you any kind of journal or quest log, that’s a choice, even if it’s not one I love. Instead, I felt like I was getting a lot of information that wasn’t particularly relevant. If I forgot where my objectives were, I resorted to stopping at any job board I passed, because I couldn’t figure out how to see them on my map screen. It felt very choppy, and I was not looking forward to starting to run into enemies that were going to take more than a couple rounds of that nonsense.īy contrast, all of the menus felt busy, but also obtuse. I would run in, poke at something with my pick once or twice, and then have to run away to give my stamina time to regen. Even the hack & slash style combat is slow – you have very limited stamina in the early game, so I felt like combat didn’t feel that great. There are also some light puzzling sections, and apparently, at least three more major areas for you to go improve upon, but – as I said – the whole thing feels very slow. Thankfully, you will wake up the next day with full health, ready to go back out there and help everyone all over again. If you manage to lose all your health, you are penalized financially, and the day ends immediately. There is some sort of day/night cycle, but it seems like it’s mainly trackable from the map, and I still haven’t been able to figure out if it’s real-time based or action based. A lot of that help is going to be combat-focused, as the main problem facing your town is The Rot, which so far seems to be little purple blobs, and the occasional goop-shooting vine.Įach day, you will check the board next to your home for requests, and then wander around trying to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of. You play as Concord the very small grape, who is being moved from his cozy assignment of tending to a single plant to the main drag of the Haven, where you’ll be tasked with helping members of your community. There is just something here that isn’t intuitive for me. ![]() This experience is basically a microcosm of the next hour of play for me. It seemed like an eternity before it occurred to me to go back inside my house, where I spotted a second exit leading me right to my objective. There didn’t seem to be a path, and I couldn’t properly interact with, well, anything at all. Initially, I stepped out of my house, and couldn’t figure out how the game expected me to get to the next objective. Garden Story starts slow, and despite a lengthy tutorial section, right from the get go, I felt like I was just missing some critical thought component to make the game make sense. ![]()
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