Solarium

Even if sometimes we take them for granted, it’s obvious that plants are vital to our survival, especially when it comes to trees or algae. Hence, there is an entire science dedicated to the study of plants, and the most important part is learning how to preserve them. One can easily imagine a future where plants grow in space stations, or maybe on the surface of terraformed planets.

Solarium is an educational puzzle game that aims to teach you a thing or two about plants and make the experience as enjoyable as possible at the same time. Thus, the adventure takes you through a variety of interesting environments and challenges you to answer plant-related questions in order to enrich your knowledge on the subject. It’s not a triple-A project, but you can have a lot of fun with the game if you get over the somewhat clunky interface.

In short, the whole thing takes place in the distant future, where a race of wise aliens have decided to document all forms of life and preserve them. Naturally, Earth comes into the equation as well, and your job as a botany student is to learn all about Earth-specific plants in order to help the aliens create adequate environments for them.

Most of your time is spent walking around, looking at plants and clicking on certain items in order to trigger a trivia question. However, sometimes it’s difficult to find plants you can interact with, because they are not properly highlighted. Thus, you often find yourself wandering aimlessly and clicking all over the place in order to find the next question.

The trivia is not that difficult, although some questions might require a bit of thinking time, especially if you are not that knowledgeable on the subject. Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that the character’s movement is very slow and annoying, and the graphics are not the prettiest out there. The whole experience is worth the trouble if you are willing to learn, however, which means that the game achieves its purpose.

Solarium could use a few fixes here and there, but you can still have a lot of fun with it nonetheless. The idea is fairly unique in the land of video games, which is yet another reason to give it a try.