Grow: Song of the Evertree

My first session with Grow: Song of the Evertree ran about three hours longer than I meant it to, which tells you something. You play as the last Everheart Alchemist, dropped into a world choked by the Withering, a thorny corruption that has driven everyone away and reduced a once-magnificent tree to a sapling. The job is to fix all of that, and the method is part gardening simulator, part town-builder, part light explorer. It sits in an odd genre pocket, and that oddness is mostly its strength. The core loop has three interlocking pieces. Up in the Evertree's branches, you plant world seeds crafted through alchemy, then tend those worlds by pulling weeds, watering plants, smashing rocks, and gradually coaxing flora and fauna into existence. The seed recipes use randomized alchemical element combinations, so the results range from predictable colorful meadows to genuinely weird stuff you did not expect. Down below, the Myora currency you earn from tending worlds funds a town-building layer where you place houses, assign jobs to randomly generated villagers (each with their own name, look, and dream career), unlock new buildings by hitting achievement thresholds, and keep community harmony high enough to push back the Withering and open new districts. Threaded through both is an exploration layer, with dungeons per district that swap out repetitive maintenance work for basic platforming and puzzle-solving. The dungeons are not hard, but they are a welcome change of pace. Post-launch, the Winds of Change update added new cave environments and expanded customization, which addressed some early criticisms about content depth. Where the game earns its Very Positive Steam rating is in the way all three systems feed into each other. Tending your branch worlds earns resources that fund town construction, which raises harmony, which opens new areas to explore, which yields more alchemy ingredients for stranger worlds. The loop is genuinely well-balanced for a game juggling this many mechanics at once. The art helps enormously: vibrant, clean environments with moving grass and rippling water, paired with a soundtrack that sits very comfortably in the background of a long session. Character customization is notably inclusive, with male, female, and non-binary options alongside adjustable body types, which is a quiet win. The rough edges are real, though. The opening few hours are a slow sell. The tutorial spoon-feeds you one tool at a time and the early resource loop feels thin before the alchemy system opens up properly. Some side features feel underdeveloped: fishing and bug-catching generate collectibles that rarely find purpose beyond the occasional villager request or nature reserve slot. The romance mechanic surfaces awkwardly and leads nowhere interesting. The main Myora currency starts meaningful but eventually inflates to the point of irrelevance. And while the PC build runs cleanly on mid-tier hardware, the animation work shows its budget with some clipping and odd physics moments. None of that kills the experience for the audience this game is built for. If you can remember losing an afternoon to Stardew Valley, or if Animal Crossing's pace felt right but the world too small, Grow occupies a similar headspace with more overt world-crafting ambition. It will bore players who need friction or challenge. For everyone else, it is the kind of game that rewards just letting it do its thing. Alex, Scout Team