While tending a garden is typically a peaceful activity, launching a freshly harvested potato at a friend offers a different kind of entertainment. This offbeat premise drives Planted!, a quirky combat game from Cloth Cat Games that transforms gardening into an all-out competition featuring vegetables and assorted specimens. In the game, players cultivate patches, grow oversized crops, and engage in physical altercations to protect their harvest or steal produce from opponents.
Creative producer Ben Cawthorne revealed that the concept originated from a desire to create multiplayer experiences playable on a couch with friends. Drawing inspiration from the era of four-player console gaming, Cawthorne pitched the idea of mashing together the gentle art of gardening with competitive sports, framing it almost as a beat-’em-up. The core loop involves growing and harvesting crops at arcade speed while competing to sell the most produce or earn the highest points. After building a successful local multiplayer prototype, the team committed to expanding the title into an online multiplayer game to accommodate players who do not always have four friends available in person.
The game's tone relies heavily on the juxtaposition between the peaceful nature of gardening and the absolute chaos of fighting. Cawthorne noted that certain ground rules anchor the experience in reality, such as claiming land by digging patches that track water levels and resources. Produce grows at different rates depending on the species, and fertilizing allows crops to reach supersized proportions. However, once players pull these items from the ground to throw them at one another, the scenario becomes ridiculous. The team embraced this non-serious approach, creating arenas in locations where gardening would not normally occur to expand gameplay beyond the initial loop.
Balancing the game presented significant creative and technical challenges. The developers focused on ensuring that progression happens in stages so players are not overwhelmed by too many features at once. In multiplayer rounds, everyone starts at zero, but arena design required careful consideration to prevent disadvantages based on starting positions. For instance, a player close to a water source might be able to grow larger produce but could be far from the selling zone, while another player near the market might lack easy access to water. The team also balanced access to power-ups, fertilizer, and high-value seeds to ensure various playstyles, from defensive gardening to aggressive sabotage, remain viable.
Cloth Cat Games' background in animation heavily influenced the visual style and character design of Planted!. Lead artist Tom Lucas brought a graphic energy to the characters, refining them around the concept of cubic watermelons often sold in boxes in Japan. This resulted in a "square but round" aesthetic for both characters and objects. The team maintained this bold, chunky 2D aesthetic within a 3D world, ensuring that lighting, color, and animation remained true to the original drawings. Playable characters include Rolly, a dog, and Leeky, a robot mascot described as cutting-edge despite resembling a computer from the 1990s.
Combat in Planted! involves using vegetables as weapons, with some becoming enormous when fully fertilized. Potatoes are highlighted as particularly dangerous because they cannot be grown by players but are fired at them by a deployable defense turret called the Spud Turret. This turret launches hypersonic potatoes at anyone who gets too close. The game features a ragdoll system that allows characters to be thrown around the arena, adding to the fun when attempting to knock items off opponents. Other power-ups include an ejector bomb that drills underground to launch enemies' vegetables across the map.
Cawthorne mentioned that some ambitious ideas did not make it into the final release, such as a "hare strike" involving a bunny bombardment where rabbits eat through obstacles. While he expressed hope for its inclusion in the future, the current focus remains on ensuring networked physics and animations sync correctly for existing power-ups. The developer hopes Planted! becomes a staple for group play, offering a non-serious competitive experience accessible to players of all skill levels. He aims to establish horticultural combat as a viable genre.
Planted! is currently available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam. A version for the Nintendo Switch is scheduled for release in 2027.
Sources: Deadline.