"Grow Valley" seems a simple game at first: Choose the order in which seven technologies are built. It's after the player has worked on it for 30 minutes that he or she begins to see how addictive it is.
The setting for this puzzle game is a green cartoon valley, and the object is to build one technology per round until all seven are chosen. Each new pick might interact with previous technologies to build a bigger and better world for your valley. Choose all seven in the correct order, and the player wins.
It's not as simple as going through all the different sequences, though. With each choice, a man or group of men jump out and build their buildings with cute sounds and funny animation, so that the player is distracted by on-screen events. The humor is so distracting that, by the end, the player has forgotten what order he chose.
Sometime changing things up can cause surprising results. One time the player might accidentally build a railway system instead of a roadway. Another sequence might mean the difference between a small health clinic and a gigantic hospital complete with helicopter pad. There's a reason the surveyor keeps looking down at a particular spot on the ground; the player has to find the right people to help him dig through.
"Grow Valley" is Asian-created, so the actual titles of each of the technologies may not make sense, such as "Matters/Chemical System" and "Mathematical Chemistry System" being considered two different sciences, but each technology has a different set of key words to assist the player in understanding what each is supposed to do. "Design" might be called "manufacturing created by human sensitivity," but the key words supplied let the gamer know this means urban development, landscaping, and ergonomicsinformation that might come in handy when choosing when to play it.
Grow Valley was made by the same people who created "Grow Island," and is one of a series of growing-type puzzle games on the Silvergames website.
