Game Review | Seed of Life. Meh

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When you’re digging through the war chest that is the gaming world, looking for a treasure to sink your gaming hours into, you tend to grab that which is shiny, right? You pick up that nugget that glints with “Triple-A Quality Graphics”, that shimmers with “Dynamic Gameplay” and that sparkles with “an emotional journey”, ok well maybe not the emotional journey part, some of us are already going through our own emotional journey, but nonetheless! That’s the nugget to pick, the one that’s going to satisfy your gaming needs, so you pick it and maybe you breathe a little hot air onto it and give it a little polish with your sleeve only to notice the golden patina starts to rub off, so you rub a little more until eventually, it turns out, you picked a lump of coal.

Now I’m not saying coal is useless! God knows that Eskom sure could use a lot more of it, I’m just saying it’s not the golden nugget you thought it was going to be.

Seed of Life is a semi open-world, action-adventure, puzzle game, with a hard focus on the puzzle, which is the only part I enjoyed. You take control of Cora, a granddaughter, living on the alien-like planet, Lumia, where almost all life has vanished. Your goal is to locate The Seed and use it to rejuvenate the planet and its life essence, saving it from annihilation.

From the beginning Seed of Life just feels dated, the character is very stick-figure-esque, she doesn’t really flow like you’d expect a 3D character to flow, the camera isn’t as smooth as you’d like it to be, and I can almost feel the code in the movement. The inner monologue of the main character feels a little awkward, I’m not really sure if it is an inner monologue or if she’s just talking aloud to herself. It took me three tries to get through the opening scene before I was finally brave enough to give the gameplay a go. It started off a little slow and things made a little more sense as I played through a little further. I picked up a few more abilities, not before dying 30 times trying to figure things out, that made the puzzle-like system more entertaining. I wouldn’t really call the puzzles puzzling, but they were fun to work through with the combination of abilities and balancing your health and mana to work your way through to the next section and once I got into it, the game got a little better, the clunky camera bothered me less and I got the hang of the code-like movement, but only for a bit until it got repetitive.

By the end of it, I wasn’t sure if I enjoyed the game or not, I don’t think the hour of when I got the hang of it made up for how iffy I felt about the rest of the game.

And so, here I sit, feeling a little bit meh and I wouldn’t want you to feel the same way.

BOTTOM LINE Seed of Life just doesn’t hit the mark. Sure, it’s got some fun bits, but I would’ve had more fun playing something else. PROS You can get into it, for a bit CONS Clunky Camera Double A Graphics? Just OK