Grass.exe is an upcoming game I had the pleasure of playtesting on Steam. It takes place in a familiar and nostalgic grassy field with wide blue skies. The playtest took me around 100 minutes to completely finish.
A cozy grass-cutting simulator with a nostalgic, digital twist
The game starts by spawning you into a grassy field with wide blue skies. A familiar scene. You start by removing grass by hand, which gives you bytes, the game’s currency. After fully upgrading your hand’s abilities, you can purchase a lawnmower and upgrade it. Grinding this part out first sets you up for success later on.
Currency can also give you some quality-of-life improvements, which I learned about much too late. I was grabbing each yellow data cube one by one while restoring folders for the longest until I realized one of the upgrades allows you to carry more at a time, which significantly helped. Once you fully upgrade your carrying capacity by hand, the option to buy a floppy disk unlocks, which holds 50 data cubes at a time.
The yellow boxes throughout the world are called data cubes. The objective is to restore the floating yellow folders throughout the world by bringing the bytes to floating folder icons that bounce in the sky. Restoring the data in them can uncover strange documents, interesting images, and screenshots.
Nothing in this world regenerates once it is picked up, mowed, or destroyed. There is a set number of viruses, data cubes, and grass in the world, and they do not regenerate. Once I got close to the end of restoring all of the folders, I found it challenging to find data cubes because they were scattered all over the place. I would pick them up in clusters, not knowing I would need to find each cube to finish the game.
there are viruses, glitches, and pop-up screen enemies
The world is not completely peaceful. I found myself with a blue screen of death in game twice because a virus got me while I wasn’t paying attention. You fight viruses by playing various minigames once they have been scanned, which could be anything from matching symbols, typing commands, and chasing down pop-ups to quarantine them.
Since there are a set number of enemies in the world, I recommend going after all of them first for a less chaotic experience mowing grass. You can also upgrade your antivirus abilities using bytes, which are earned from mowing the grass.
Some viruses even drop data cubes.
cozy to chaos within seconds
One moment I was peacefully mowing grass, the next I am chasing down malicious pop-ups or getting a blue-screen of death. This game has a high contrast between cozy and chaos, which is exactly the kind of game I love playing.
The game ends once all the folders have been restored, all viruses destroyed, and all the grass has been mowed. Once you get to the last few patches of grass, the games adds a tracker to the UI. I was very grateful to see that feature, because it’s easy to miss a small patch of grass and be stuck searching for it,
This game has familiar core mechanics that most simulator games use, so it’s easy to pick up on, but the concept is so unique it keeps it from being boring. I really enjoyed playing this demo, it reminded me of Code Lyoko (which I loved growing up!)
Overall, I think this game has a lot of potential. It has unique concepts while using core mechanics that are familiar and easy to pick up on. The art is gorgeous and nostalgic, the gameplay is satisfying but keeps you on your toes, and the surreal digital environment is fantastic. I really felt like I was sitting at my family computer in 2003.
I was in a flow state finishing the rest of the playtest. I could see myself getting sucked into the full game for hours if there was the content for it.
Grass.Exe is set to release November 12th. Wishlist it on Steam to get notified when it drops!
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