Viridi - Watching Grass Grow

We play games for a multitude of reasons. For the challenge, to explore a new world, to get social. But sometimes a game is just therapeutic, just busywork to zone out to. I recently had a look at 'Viridi,' a game where you maintain a small garden of potted plants. It's hard to say if you can even consider Viridi a videogame, but I still wanted to share my experience. My last few articles had a pretty negative angle, so I just wanted to write something nice about a chill little piece of software.

Sowing the Seeds

Viridi is at its most interactive when it begins. You're given a few choices, like the plants you want to start with and the pot you want to keep them in. Once you're all done, it's a matter of planting the seeds where you want, watering them and then turning off Viridi to check back again later. The plants grow in real time, so this is truly the kind of game (or experience or software) that you just check on every day.

This is how my little garden looked right after planting the seeds:

After everything is planted, all you can really do is water your plants, but they can be killed if you overwater them, so once per plant is usually enough. Viridi is very lenient, though, and plants can be overwatered pretty severely or left without water for some amount of days before there are any real consequences. It makes sense, really - the last thing you want is a therapeutic game about maintaining a garden to stress you out. I actually forgot about the game for a while after trying it, but came back to find my garden perfectly fine and starting to bloom quite nicely.




A nice touch about Viridi is that, when you open the game, it shows a sped up version of the growth your plans have undergone while you were away. There's something satisfying about that.


Reaping the Rewards?

Once your plants are fully grown in Viridi, that's it. Or that would be it, but the otherwise free game allows you to buy additional plants and other decorations if you so desire. But if you're not exactly in a position to spend money on digital plants, you don't need to worry; you get a free plant every week.

Beyond that, though, that really is all there's to the game. But maybe that's all there needed to be. Just a little garden of your own to take care of when you feel like it. Another nice thing - if you want to keep your garden safe, but don't have the time or motivation to start up the game, you can set it to 'vacation mode' to essentially freeze time for your garden. Once it reached a state I liked and I decided I was done with it, I did just that.

Though it's ultimately very simple, I really did enjoy taking care of my garden in Viridi for a little while. There's something to be said for little therapeutic experiences that focus on something so wholesome and inherently pleasant as taking care of some little plants.

Viridi Vidi Vici

I made my garden my way, but there are many options - not to mention, the fact that you get random free plants means your garden will always be a little different from everyone else's. I'd like to invite everyone who has a few spare minutes to try out Viridi, make their own garden and maintain it for a few days and post a picture of it here. I'd love to see what other people can make.

You can try Viridi here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/375950/Viridi/