Botanicula • Eurogamer.net

Botanicula to bring joy, wonder to iPad next week

The cutest game ever gets cuter on tablets.

Machinarium developer Amanita Design's adorable insect-based exploration game Botanicula is coming to iPad on 1st May.

The people behind Machinarium don't just make crazy video games

They make crazy music videos, too.

Czech Republic studio Amanita Design is best known for making beautiful point and click adventures Machinarium, Botanicula and Samorost, but it does more than develop video games.

Botanicula Review

The roots that clutch.

Read the small print carefully, OK? Botanicula sells itself as a point-and-click exploration game as opposed to a point and click adventure game. What kind of difference can that single word make? Plenty, actually. Come here looking for the puzzles, for instance, and you may find yourself feeling quietly disappointed. Turn up with a bit of a rambly micro-safari in mind, however, and you'll probably be in a state of complete rapture from the word go.

Botanicula's the latest game from Amanita Design, the Czech studio that previously gave us Machinarium, amongst other treats. Machinarium was a lovely, lonely adventure starring the world's most huggable robots (second-most huggable if you've seen Silent Running, obv.), and while Botanicula's not a sequel by any means, it feels like a sort of companion piece. Here, the previous game's rusting scrap metal landscape is replaced with its exact opposite - a muddle of moss and twigs and creaking bioluminescent branches - while the cast of malfunctioning droids has been swapped out in favour of a gloopy selection of grubs, beetles, snails and spiders.

One of those spiders is responsible for what little narrative the game possesses, after it pinches a crucial seed from the huge home tree that provides Botanicula's setting. I think that's what happens, anyway; it's all a bit vague. No matter. It seems there's a dark force of corruption spreading across this natural paradise, and after a few lavishly pretty and endearingly skippable cut-scenes, you're off to save the day, in the form of a tiny rabble of unlikely heroes.