GDC '08: Culture Hands-On

SAN FRANCISCO--In case you missed the news from Microsoft's GDC keynote address this morning, there are currently playable demos for several XNA-developed games available for free download via the Xbox Live Marketplace. One of the more unusual games among them is Culture, a colorful puzzle game in which you're tasked with getting rid of weeds and creating pictures by planting flowers. There are three very different gameplay modes available in the demo, and, as you'll see, some are more compelling than others.

The "bloom game" mode, which was shown briefly during this morning's keynote address, tasks you with getting rid of weeds that are attempting to spread across a spherical garden that looks like an empty Super Mario Galaxy level. As you rotate the garden around, you'll notice that weeds are popping up all over it (albeit very slowly in the early levels), and the only way to get rid of them is by planting flowers so that they form a circle around the offending plants. The circles can be any size and don't really have to resemble a circle. But they need to be composed of flowers of the same color, and you definitely can't get away with simply drawing a ring around the entire sphere, which we tried.

In the early bloom game levels, you'll only planting one or two different colors of flower, and you'll get lots of one kind to work with before the seed feeder (which appears in the top right corner of the screen) forces you to use another color. Different-colored flowers can't be sown on top of each other, so as an increasingly large selection is added to your feeder, you have to be much more careful about how you plant them. Red flowers are unique, incidentally, in that they can be planted atop weeds and instantly kill them. Don't expect to get a whole lot of those, though.

The second mode we played, titled "paint with flowers," was far less enjoyable than the first. Although it proved to be quite challenging on one occasion, it's not a game in which you could ever actually fail. It's just painting by numbers, except that you're planting different colored flowers where you'd usually be slapping on the paint. Your seed palette is laid out in such a way that each color can be identified using a single letter and a single number. Each square on the canvas grid has a letter and a number in it. You identify which color you need, you plant the flower, and it grows there, as well as in any adjoining square of the same color. As the canvas fills with a veritable field of flowers, it becomes more challenging because the squares that you've yet to plant in get quite difficult to find--even when you use the trigger buttons to zoom in and out for a better look.

Even more baffling is the Culture demo's third mode of play, "flower garden." Even after checking out the tutorial, we weren't entirely sure what to do with this one. It's a garden with flowers in it, and you can combine different pairs of flowers to form hybrids, which then grow in the garden. If there's any other point to this mode, it's lost on us right now. We're wondering if perhaps the garden is simply a place to keep and "play" with flowers that you've unlocked in the other modes.

Regardless of the fact that not all of the modes we played really appealed to us, Culture is an interesting and nice-looking XNA game. It's conceivable that the finished game might feature additional modes as well, so we'll certainly be keeping an eye on this one going forward.