The Greenening

🌱 I Thought I Was Playing the Demo... Then I Accidentally Finished the Entire Game I should probably begin this review with a confession. I started The Greenening believing I was playing the demo. I thought I'd spend maybe half an hour with it, get a feel for the game and then move on to something else. Three and a half hours later I'd completed the entire game, earned 100% of the Steam achievements and finally realised that I'd actually been playing the full version all along. Oops. The Greenening is a wonderfully simple incremental game where you control a little rain cloud trying to bring life back to a world covered in ash. You begin by washing away relatively small amounts of it with your water droplets, revealing the world that has been buried underneath. As you progress, your cloud becomes stronger, your abilities improve and the amount of ash you need to clear increases. New upgrades and mechanics gradually appear, but so do new obstacles, meaning the basic idea remains familiar while there's usually something new arriving to keep the progression interesting. What I particularly enjoyed was being able to actually see the difference I was making. You're not simply watching numbers increase on a screen. You're taking somewhere buried beneath ash and gradually revealing colour, plants and life again. As somebody who loves nature and strongly believes we should be looking after the planet we've got, that whole theme was always going to appeal to me. The progression also felt very well judged. Upgrades came regularly enough that I was always working towards something, my little cloud became noticeably more capable, and I never felt as though the game was deliberately putting the brakes on simply to make itself last longer. And thank goodness, there isn't a prestige system in sight. The Greenening simply doesn't need one. The journey itself provides the progression. You become stronger, the challenge increases, new things appear and eventually you reach a proper destination. There was never a point where I thought resetting everything and repeating the same journey would somehow improve it. Things culminate in a final level where you have to deal with the cause of all that ash, and without spoiling what happens, I'll simply say that the game certainly makes you work for the ending. It was a considerable step up from what had come before, but reaching the other side left me feeling genuinely satisfied. The Greenening knows what it wants to be, delivers its message without beating you over the head with it and, importantly for an incremental game, knows when it has done enough. I went in expecting a 30-minute demo. I came out three and a half hours later having restored the world, completed the game and collected every achievement. Apparently I was enjoying myself. 💜 Tom Recommends

1 found this helpful

Nice increamental game. A bit too grindy in a mid-late, but overall nicely balanced. Thx Erik :)

I got this game as i saw the developer on tiktok and wanted to support it. The game is super cute and I don't know how but during a heat wave it made me feel cooler XD I guess all the focus on water with the lush greenery tricked my brain. The upgrades are very satisfying and its fun to get through each chapter!

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really relaxing. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

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Really well made active incremental, enjoyed every second of the 2.5 hours it took to 100% it