Blueberry Garden removes the linearity that is almost a hallmark of the genre. Instead of plugging ahead toward the obvious goal, you start off more or less in the middle of the game and work out. The soundtrack is beautiful and along with the whimsical, stick figure art style creates a real feeling of freedom as you wander around, and particularly when you take to the air. Fans of this game, myself included, immediately come up with charming and whimsical to describe both the game play and style.
The clever open ended platform environement of Blueberry Garden is complemented well with different fruits lying around, which have effects not only on you, but the environment. This makes for a neat puzzle element as you explore the Blueberry Garden and discover which fruits do what and how to use them to get the bizarre items that stack up near the starting point, which you can leap from the top of to fly further and see more of the game.
There is the problem - there’s not much game to see. As enjoyable as wandering the Blueberry Garden is, it will take only a couple hours to unravel its mysteries, and that is it. While the game has a very big level, it only has the one level. It would be wonderful to expand the game and have a single, giant, open ended level to enjoy, but that would take a lot of design. The compromise would have been to include several levels.
Though having won the main Award at the Independent Games Festival, Blueberry Garden is less universally loved than Tag. Some of this is obviously down to Tag being a free download produced by students, while Blueberry Garden is a commercial project that will set you back a fiver at Steam. Obviously, a five dollar hamburger should be better than free one.
Whether Blueberry Garden is worth five bucks depends largely on if you immediately fall in love with the look and feel of the game or not. I can’t recommend purchasing it to everyone, but the demo (also at Steam) is definitely worth a spin.