Reach for the Sun

For $5, you can experience rasterized graphics that only a Flash website could love and compete against garden pests and an eventual winter. In all seriousness, there is little to no reason to call this video game but rather an interactive biology teaching resource as a result of its non-gameplay and bare minimum attempt at demonstrating botany and gardening through edu-entertainment. Reach for the Sun belongs on a website or digital portfolio, not on the Steam store page.

Looks simple to begin with but is actually quite advanced, deep and educates along the way!.

It would appear not all plants make it, in fact less than 1%..

Busy clicking game. Was mildly entertaining when first released many years ago, but it's really past its prime now 10 years later. Just isn't fun at all. Clunky clicking controls that aren't very responsive. Just skip it. Move on to other things.

As Educational as it gets!

Gameplay

ːsteamthumbsupː Click mode and Strategy mode

• Game has two modes. One which runs in real time and you have to click on parts of a plant. Other one is supposedly harder, strategy mode which is measured in turns. The truth is that strategy mode is easier. In real time you lose resources if you do not click fast enough on a leaf or a root. In addition, since clicking on leafs takes away resources, you can easily play sub-optimally. In addition, you have to deal with various effects like frostbites and insects. It is a cool feature, but it makes game into two separate mini-games.
  
  ːBUSTLINGFUNGUSː Upgrades
  
• This game has several upgrades to unlock. They are helpful, but it makes already easy game even easier. It also just outright removes various in-game mechanics in a game which severely lacks content as it is. It is literally upgrade to play less of this game.
  
  ːsteamthumbsdownː Lack of Content
  
• The biggest issue this game has that it severely lacks content. Both in terms of gameplay and educational. I would be fine with gameplay being as simple as it is. However, there is just next to none information on plants. I learned next to nothing, I had only refreshed what I already knew. I understand that original audience for this game is supposed to be kids. However, since when you can say that you literally know all the facts in school's textbooks? This lack of educational content, lack of interesting information makes this game truly a disappointment.
  
  From gameplay side, I was missing more and more meaningful mechanics. Frostbites are random. Why there isn't any draughts? Why you do not have varying season lengths? Why temperature does not go lower or higher with accompanying bonuses? There is ton of real life effects on plants which this game misses and it just shows how little effort developer had put into making this a good product to play.
  
  ːsteamthumbsdownː Technical Problems
  
[*]Last, but not least are game's technical problems. This game does not have something as simple as full screen view. Game lacks animations or slows to the crawl in certain places. When I played this title, I felt exactly why it has mixed ratings on Steam. I thought that it was merely because people purchased a simple game and they were disappointed by a simple game. However, that is not the case. Game looks great only in screenshots while in reality it just barely works on computers.

A Game good only for kids at school

intro

What i like

What i don't like about the game

Others

While the concept of learning + gaming is nothing new.... The game sorely misses the mark besides basic biology. Overall -- game becomes a resource management game where you frantically click parts of the plant to grow.

Would consider if its 95% off and you are achievement hunting.

Restarted this game (revisited). I saw I played it before in 2013 or so. Apparently the game was not able to keep me playing at that time and it is now clear to me why. Just isn't that interesting.

Played it to a 100% complete (in achievements) (within 2.1 hrs)
Won't be revisiting this game again. Replay value is just very low.

I do not know how much I payed for this, but it should not be worth much for what it is, maybe a buck or 2.

It's a boring clicking game. No real challenge. No skill. Just click and unlock.
When you have an evening of nothingness, some beer and just relax, you can click through from some mild entertainment. I was hoping to have a more tamagotchi kind of experience, but it is far from that.
Might be nice for young children or something. It is definitely family friendly.

Graphics are ok.
Music and sounds are 'calming'.
Voice is actually quite good. Nice explanation and vocal tutorial.
UI, is kind of ok. I did not really encounter a major problem navigating.
Annoying part was the aspect ration of the screen (not wide screen, black bars).

It's fun and looks nice.
Took me about an hour and a half to complete so I'd say buy in a sale or something and it's a good length for the price.
Very relaxing and I like plants ;)

This game does a decent job, on an extremely basic level, at showing how plants function. The goal is to grow the plant to its complete size and harvest all of the seeds before the growing season is over.

Overall, the plants are very similar in that they have predefined growth points. Sometimes you get the option to grow a flower instead of a node, but not often. The only thing that really differs between the plants other than the looks, seed production, and some other basic things is that each one generates and requires varying amount of resources to create more roots, notes, leaves, flowers, and fruit.

What is not very obvious at first is that this is less about learning about the plants and more of a resource-harvesting clicker game. In order to gain any of the resources to keep growing your plants, you have to click on each part that glows. If you don't click as soon as the glow appears, the amount you can gather goes down and will eventually be lost. As your plant gets larger, the clicking turns into a frenzy. Meanwhile, you're also trying to grow more by clicking on the growth points.

Once you have a flower, not only do you have to tell the flower to create pollen, but you have to manually drag a bee to the flower. This wastes valuable time that can be used to click for more resources. Before the garden is fully upgraded, you also have to worry about clicking on pests, pulling off blighted leaves, and warming up frost-bitten leaves.

Even with all of the clicking requirements, I was able to obtain all of the achievements and fully grow the prickly pear within 2 hours. I haven't played it in Strategy mode, but the growth model is the same. I can't really see any replay value. There is plenty of room for improvement, such as more types of plants, freeform growth instead of pre-defined points, sandbox mode (no season timer, etc), and more realism.

I'm recommending it because it was a pleasant little game that is a bit different from the few in its class. Due to the lack of replay and the really short playtime, my recommendation is only if it's on sale. I bought this as part of a weeklong deal at 75% off ($1.24). My general rule for no-replay casual games is $1/hr. The sale puts it in that realm.

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There might be a reason, why some seeds are duds!

Enjoyable little time killer and easy 100%. Very relaxing, especially in strategy mode. I think I got it for US$2 and played almost 3 hours, so beats my $1/h threshold.

Did I learn anything about biology? It's a game, not a science book, but you do get the things needed for plat growth at a very basic level so play it with a younger grade schooler perhaps, or just have fun with it as a game. 6/10

As a botanist and a gamer, Reach for the Sun makes me feel both sad and embarassed. It's not a fun game; it's not a good learning tool; and the lessons that it does teach are often wrong. Yet, somehow, this game has won multiple awards, and the fact of those awards really does make me sad. To give this game an award is to suggest that this is the best we can do. That suggestion is disrespectful to science, because science has huge potential for fun (e.g. Kerbal Space Program). It's also disrespectful to gamers, and to our proven ability to create great games.

The most obvious problem is that the gameplay is all about clicking - even in strategy mode, it's all about the clicking.

A much bigger problem is that, as a player, you have very little agency. You can't just grow your plant in whatever way you like. Instead, each plant has a predetermined fully-grown shape, a shape that was fixed by the developers at compile time. When you add new parts to a plant, you're really just unlocking bits of that predetermined shape. This means that the game is much more about memorization than it is about botany or tactics. To be successful, you need to learn the shape of the fully-grown plant, and then figure out the series of choices that will allow you to most quickly unlock all of the parts of your plant.

As a botanist, I teach that plants must adapt themselves to their environment by making choices about how they will grow. If a seed lands in an unfortunate place, it can't simply pick itself up and go somewhere else, but must instead grow where it lies. For example, a bush on a rocky cliff may grow short and squat to protect itself from cold and wind; while a bush in a shady glade may grow tall and slim to try and reach above its neighbors, and grab a bigger share of sunlight. Thus, the idea that each species of plant has a fixed shape (an idea implicitly taught by this game) is false and misleading.

Another big flaw in the game is the lack of differentiation among species. While there are several different species in this game, from a gameplay standpoint, they're pretty much the same. As a gamer, I find this boring. As a botanist, I find it offensive. The joy and beauty in life and biology come from from the huge variety of shapes, colors, and behaviors that are present in nature. To teach otherwise, as this game does, is a terrible lie.

If you're looking for a bit of variety in your procrastination, something to give you a break from Peggle or Candy Crush, then you may find a bit of enjoyment in this game. If you're looking for something with replay value or educational value, you should look elsewhere.

I enjoy plant games but there isn't a lot of replayability with this one. The game is short, there's a LOT of clicking involved, there's no storyline or anything. Even the achievements only took a couple hours to get.

I wouldn't buy it unless you have some sort of need to have every plant game available on Steam.

Well Im torn on whether to recommend this game or not. It only takes 2 hours or so to complete the main game and unlock all the acheviements. So I would not recommend spending much on the game.

It is however, fairly interesting to play. There are two modes. "Cliassic" mode which I didnt like as its a simple clickfest as you franticly click to gather resources to continue building your plant. Then there is a "strategy" mode, which is esentially a turn based game. I enjoyed this mode much more. In this mode you plan each turn and spend your available resources all while trying to grow your plant enough to produce seeds to gain points to spend on new plants and upgrades.

Overall I do recommend this game, just know it will only take a couple hours to complete and try to grab it at a discount like I did.

I'm not sure how I feel in general about such adult content on Steam, but that certainly didn't stop me from buying Reach for the Sun. The idea is simple enough, grow your plants tall and firm, then make them seed. But don't let such simplicity fool you, there are several extremely attractive plant types to choose from, and if you play your cards right, you can make each plant seed up to four times! From the seductive Sunflower, to the intoxicating Prickly Pear, Reach for the Sun is sure to keep you coming back for more.

A small educational game about plants that sadly lacks depth and becomes a manic click-fest just to gather your resources in time. Not quite sure how I would improve the game but its gameplay could need a fair bit of tweaking. The dev do seem fairly active so the game can still be very much improved.

Very simplistic achievements that mostly are tied to upgrades and growing each plant in an optimal way.

Time to 100%: 2-3 hours

The recent update including the strategy mode cuts down on the "clickiness" by a lot; which leaves this game as a 4/5 for somehow being fun and educational. The update also had the unseen benefeit of cutting down a graphical issues, since it can go as a turn-based, not real-time.

On surface level the concept seems very interesting. For once, instead of killing monsters and shooting people, you get to grow a flower and spread new life! With multiple different flowers and an upgrade system you're bound to have many hours of fun here, right?

Well, sadly no. There doesn't seem to be any way to really strategize the growing of your flowers, since there's actually only one right way to grow all the flowers, which there are four visually different ones, but which play identically. Reach for the Sun really feels like a simple flash game made as a proof-of-concept or something similar. Play time is somewhere under an hour after which you have gained everything and done everything.

A shame really. With extended gameplay and more interesting mechanics the game could potentially be a unique little flower, but currently it is just over-priced run-of-the-mill flash game you could find on any website.

A nice casual educational game, or so it thought. It turned out to be a mindnumbing clickfest game like no other; and it can be completed with all achievements gained in an hour.
The educational value is close to none and game overall is way to simplistic for a 9€ pricetag.

Interesting game. The concept is what got me interested but at the end of the day, it felt like a click fest with no discernable goal or end game to achieve.

Why am I trying to grow individual flowers? Is it for the seeds? So that next season I can plant one more flower?

If they added some scale to this game, like, every year you have a few more flowers to take care of simultaneously, and then eventually you're tending a garden or something, it might have held my interest.

Beyond that, all I did was click click click click click click click click click to get a flower grown and harvest my seeds. Kind of one dimensional I guess...

Cool concept, needs more end game. Thanks for teaching me about plants.

A cute little simulation game. I wouldn't pay the full price ($10), but I believe I made an okay deal when I got it for $5 on sale. The game doesn't offer too much gameplay time (aka replay value is pretty low, at least until they release more type of plants and maybe more extra stuff, if they ever do), but again - for $5 it's pretty much a fair deal. It's definitely not worth any more than that, though.