I played through Eufloria a couple years ago but still wanted to talk about it here. It falls under a niche genre called “ambient” games because of its relaxing properties. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that a lot of the indie games I have bought are puzzle games, which are sort of relaxing but it requires a lot of thought, strategizing, and planning which I don’t want to deal with right now. Probably explains why I have been hesitant to start up a new game each week (as I don’t want to keep talking about the quality of the puzzles and whatnot), but let me return to Eufloria.

Eufloria is a strange mix of real-time strategy and action. But wait, didn’t I just say it was relaxing? Yes, most striking of all, it is relaxing, but I’ll get to that later. The premise of the game is you are in charge of seeds in a galaxy populated with planets. There are other seeds, “enemy seeds,” that you want to protect your planets from. Each level is essentially a territory game where you are fighting with enemies to lay claim to planets.

Your objective is to plant seeds so that they grow into trees and sprout more seeds for you to use. Depending on the planet, the seeds produced take on characteristics of that planet. Specifically, speed, strength, and stamina. What’s really cool is these three attributes are also reflected in the model of the seed so they will be shaped differently according to attribute.

Also interesting is the depth of zoom and how the graphics change accordingly. It’s very smooth and seemless so it’s always fun to zoom in and out when you have time. Zoomed all the way out, you may just see the trees attached to the planets and little motes for the seeds circling around. Zoomed all the way in, you can see the tree’s roots which stretch into the core of the planet, its leaves, and the shape of the seeds. Although the graphics are “simple,” this complexity depending on zoom adds a nice touch.

The zoom also works with the audio. The closer you are to the action, the more sound effects you hear. The farther away, the more soundtrack is emphasized. So, I’d like to think it is the zoom distance that contributes largely to the ambient feel of the game. Zoomed in too much and you miss what is going on at other planets until it is too late, so generally you are zoomed out far enough that sound effects are minimal or not heard at all. The tracks are also very laid back and relaxing, setting a seemingly conflicting atmosphere of pleasant vs. dominating action, but it balances in favor of relaxing.

In terms of gameplay, you can treat it largely as an RTS and being active in moving your seeds around in micro-maneuvers or more passive and amass a large enough force to just zerg your enemies for total takeover. Zerging doesn’t always work (it was my dominant strategy as I was lazy), especially when there are multiple enemies because that leaves one of your base planets easy for takeover.

Each planet is capable of producing a certain amount of seeds and once produced, the trees will stop generating seeds until they have moved on. But you can still send seeds to a maxed out planet and they will be keep circling. One of my strategies was to use planets that had good traits as producers and planets that had bad traits as docking stations for the produced seeds, then send them back to a planet that’s under attack or send them to take over an enemy planet.

Eufloria is a fun, pleasant game. Earlier levels are really quick to finish but later levels become more complex and hence take longer to complete. I don’t think I had a level that took me over an hour to finish, however. I’d definitely recommend this game to players looking for something simple, but deep, to play. It could be considered a transition-type game for casual players looking to go into something more involved than just clicking crops or cows, but still have that relaxing feel to it.