Bonsai

Playing this game is the equivalent of being trapped in an elevator, except you're choosing to do it to yourself.

If you run it in the background with the music off and really enjoy pruning things, you might like this game. There isn't really anything else to do or say about it - there are two buttons. One waters, and one prunes. There are many better options for relaxing tree-based gameplay.

3/10 (Long story short) Bonsai simulator where you prune trees that're definitely not bonsai for hours.

Although Bonsai is mildly relaxing it doesn't provide a good example of actual bonsai and falls short due to not having a save option, having to be left running all the time, and few options. To get all the achievements it will take around 30 hours of play time and most of it will be AFK waiting for the tree to grow. My takeaway:

Pros

• Can Be Relaxing
  
• The Tree Looks Nice And Sometimes Moves
  

• The Music
  
• Enraging Wait Times
  
• Not A Good Representation of Bonsai
  
• -So Don't Bother Using This An An Education Tool
  
• Grindy
  
• Extremely Limited
  
• It's Just A Tree On Some Land
  
• Becomes An Eyesore After A While
  
• Even If You Prune It The Tree Will Go In Whatever Direction It Wants
  
• The Highlight Branch Feature Is Useless
  
• Needs To Be Fullscreen
  
• Limited Tree Choice
  
• Boring
  
[*] No Tutorial

i bought this game for .50 cents pretty much when i joined steam. it took me like 2 years and broke my mouse clicker to get the last achievement. it was totally worth .50 cents.

my buddy quit steam and came back a year later and said man i cant believe your still playing this game. lol

This is a bad game. Mind you, I only have 3 or so hours in the game, but from this time I've learned multiple things:

1. Time doesn't move unless you have the game up. This means that if you have it in the background playing while you're doing other stuff, nothing happens. So you have to actively have the game up in order for it to work. I can't even say this wouldn't be a problem. Becuase it is. I like to have relaxing games that I can come back to and check on while I'm doing other stuff, this isn't one of those games. You can't have the windows side by side either, cus it still wont play.

2. Watering the plants does next to nothing later in the game. At the start it helps speed the process up, but past that its shit. Which brings me to another thing, the controls. You can't zoom into specific parts of the tree and the camers is positioned to right below the middle of the tree. So you're forced to zoom ALL the way out if you want to see the full tree. This is even more annoying when you have to trim the branches up top. Past that the controls are awkward. Instead of clicking on trimming or watering to use it, you click on them to deactivate it. So if you want to trim, you have to click on the water icon, and vice versa.

3. Achievements. What the fuck are achievements. Its just a complete grindfest. One achievement is to literally trim 3000 branches. Sounds easy, right? Well 15 hours later and a lot of people still haven't got the achievement. If you play for achievements, or just can't help but finish games for the achievements, then you're in for the long run.

Honestly, don't buy this. Its a waste of a dollar. Use that to buy a pack of gum or something.

I have a few tips for this game.

Tip 1. Grow a decent sized bush

Tip 2. Shape bush into a sharp point

Tip 3. Insert sharp pointed bush as far up Devs arse as possible.

Tip 4. Uninstall and never install again.

Why am I here and why are you here? This is such a dumb concept for a game. But still good if you enjoy watching a tree grow and trimming it.

This game presents itself as a relaxing tree growing game, however the achievements make it into a grindy clicker game, and both are pretty bad. Watching the trees grow initially is actually decently relaxing, however the lack of control, limited options, and poor visuals are very uncompelling. I honestly wouldn't have a problem with this game not holding my interest for more than 5 minutes with this price tag, had Viridi not been able to make a hell of a relaxing plant growing game for free.

For a causal game with a concept so pure and relaxing, this game is frustrating as hell. You have no influence on how your tree grows besides clicking it to make it grow a bit faster. You don't even get to decide what tree to grow, it's all randomly generated. All you can do is remove branches you didn't like where they grew and hope they are nice next time.

This game doesn't have a goal, but if you're one who plans on 100% the achievements for it, cutting branches is what you will be doing for way too fucking long. There are two extremely grindy achievements for no reason that just gives you time to examine all the flaws in this game.

Grinding is nothing new, but it's usually rewarding. You gain things and feel progress throughout to remain intrigued, however this challenge is only external, there is no reason or demand for you to do them in game.

The design of this game is also awful.
The music is super annoying, which for a game that is supposed to be relaxing, and one that you will spend a lot of time idling in grinding, is a huge problem. At least you can turn it off.
The "level" is minimalistic, but also rough and janky which contrast each other really horribly.
The leaves are revolving 2d sprites and float around the branch instead of on it which look horrible as the tree gets bigger.
It also crashed and glitched a few times, but it was infrequent enough that I will state it's "buggy."

In conclusion, don't buy this, play Viridi instead.

Never been so intrigued by trees growing. Great stress reliever after a tough game of Rainbow 6.

I thought this game would be a fun little interlude from other more involved games I've downloaded. I won't say that I outright hate the game or wouldn't recommend it to others. You have to be in the game the entire time the tree you are working on is growing. From what I've seen you can't even bounce back and forth from one tree to the next and have all the trees you planted continue to grow. I'm sure this was intentional for the purpose of trimming and watering the tree into the shape you want, and is not in and of itself a problem. The issue I took is with the fact that it takes a tree forever to grow. I had never planned to be in the game for hours upon hours of snail paced tree growing. It's a downside for me. I guess if you are a hardcore virtual bonsai fanatic then this is just the game for you. I'll give it another go at some point, but I already have a feeling this is a flop purchase for me.

This game was not worth my money no matter how low the cost on sale was.
This game is not worth the time to play.

Okay a bit more explanation for those of you who want it.
You need to have the game running in order for the tree to grow and it grows really really slowly. The essense of this is that you spend you time in an entvironment thats about as fun as watching paint dry.
The crapics arent that good and the controls are lacking. You get very little instructions (almost none) into what everything does and what kind of importance the tools have. There is no instructions on how to grow different trees. It does have a decent background ambience.

If you like watching paint dry or want a game that you have to keep running and then check in on every 10 minutes to cut a branch, then this is the game for you. But you've been warned about how boring and lacking this game is.

First of all: my english ist very broken - but i want to learn it.
Therefore, I write this time in English. Have fun :D
___

Hy everybody!

In my opinion the game for 99 cents is still too expensive because ...

• (-) The grafics are very low -> the leaves do not hang on the branches (but anywhere in the image)
  
• (-) The view of the branches is blocked by the leaves
  
• (-) The camera can use only limited (zoom in - zoom out - rotate from a fixed point)
  
• (-) Very bad control
  
• (~) Achievements ... cut 2000 and 6000 branches (i'll go for it - LAME !!)
  
• (~) The Idea poorly implemented
  
[*](+) The idea of the game is very nice

Essentially, all you do is click on a tree, click to grow, click to cut. Good time waster when you want something simple to play. Only hard part is patiently yet furiously clicking to get a sapling into a tree.

Turn it on and go play another game while it runs then come back and hour later to trim some branches then leave again.

This game is bad. Trees don't grow like this. I played for about 15 minutes, my tree grew to have a couple of branches, but it never had any leaves. It just looked like firewood sticking up from the ground. Trees don't grow without foliage!

The definition of a bonsai is "tree in a pot". This game doesn't have pots. The tree just grows in a rectangular slab with some green on top.

The game allows for some realistic bonsai development in the sense that you can let the tree grow taller and then chop it down to get low branching. But the branches that appear from the chop point are immediately far too thick, almost the thickness of the stem below the cut point! That's not how it works! You can't build taper into your tree this way. Even the sample trees on the Steam images and videos look very young and slender. Bonsai trees are supposed to look old, massive and weathered.

I wanted to grow a Bonsai...can't even see it because the camera angles and controls are NON existent...went to the settings and theres NOTHING. GG Dawg...would uninstall it again.

I love bonsais. Whatever those sad little trees generated by this game are, they are not it. They lack the grace, leaves connected in a natural fashion, softer and more customizable trunks, branches that dont magically regrow after each cut and a growth cycle and a over timer based growth system that doesnt require the player to click like a lunatic.

Pretty sure this is something that merely serves to develop carpal tunnel. As far as I can tell the only thing you do is click it over and over and over and over and over.... to water it and then cut whatever. It's boring and tedious.

I named my tree dissapointment and watched it grow with every minute passing by. If you love staring at your monitor for hours listening to annoying shitty music then this game is for you! But then again it's still better than Call of Duty.

My game keeps crashing everytime I poen it, could you maybe fix that? If you did, thx sm! But so far the ads and everything makes me really excited to play it!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJX5qNbHU3s

'Bonsai' is a good idea in theory, but it's developer (and publisher) Rooted Concepts has put very little effort into it, not to mention doesn't quite know what the concept of a "bonsai plant" is or what one looks like. This title immediately comes off like the most basic of Unity clicker assets, the kind you see accompanying 'Clicker Heroes' knock-offs on various mobile stores, crossed with 'Viridi' except with a price tag and none of that free title's charm. What's worse is the Steam community voted for this dreck to be on the Steam marketplace.

Yes, ninety-nine cents US doesn't seem like much until you start playing what you just bought, or what someone gave you as a gag gift because "You like shit, make a let's play out of this!" and you'll feel bad if you don't. A small patch of land with a sometimes ribbed-for-her-pleasure penis-looking tree that only grows, leans and throbs when the game is running is all you get. The options are sparse as well, and all you can do to the tree is prune it. After two hours I found my mighty Oak finally bloomed, and upon pruning nipped the tip and had to start from scratch. When I did this, however, I was eventually greeted with magical floating leaves with no branches to prune, as shown in the above video.

This title's also a surprising resource hog that needs a sturdy computer to run. An i7 is required, but for what exactly? The branches! Yes, whenever they show, there's so many you can choose from to trim and rid yourself of the obvious clip art leaves that seem to grow in at all the wrong angles need strength to go from one highlighted spot to the net. Of course they have an obvious base background color around them, leading me to suspect yet more google images copy and paste tactics like 'The Slaughtering Grounds' was guilty of. The music is also severely out of place and sounds like a cheap knock-off of Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" at time, but done with a ukulele and xylophone instead. It made me want to smoke up and chill at a beach barbecue more than relax and trim my "bonsai" tree. A simple Youtube audio library search and I found a royalty free classical piece that better suits the whole purpose of the game, and didn't cleash with the obvious 'Vivardi' knock-off visuals and core concept, so you can't say finding a similar piece out there on the internet was impossible given the power of Google these days.

Further more, there's three save spots, and (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) no way to choose which tree to grow. It just happens. Again, nothing grows when the game is running, so you either need a good rig like I do to play something else while it grows (I put another hour into 'Victor Vran', personally), or just walk away for a bit and hope the appendages of the tree don't cause your computer to crash or go up in smoke. Seriously, 'My Name is Mayo' probably could run on an old 486, but this sit-back-and-do-nothing-but-watch-a-digital-tree-grow simulation game, the Steam equivilent of the USB Pet Rock, needs a core-i7 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 card minimum? It all just seems like bad programing to me, really. Perhaps the looped audio made the developer snap before loading it to Steam in the firstplace.

'Bonsai' honestly just looks and feels like bad/lazy programming on every level. There's room to make this a fairly zen experience, or offer elements to make it seem like you're actually nurturing your tree such as weather augmentation controls, laying down mulch or dirt, pulling weeds to make your tiny patch of floating-in-eternal-purgatory land look nice. Hell, even simple customizations like adding a bird house after a certain point would help make it more of an experience, all of which Rooted Concepts completely ignored for what looks like nothing but a quick buck at the expense of the fools who green lit this title, and those looking for a gag gift. Unless you absolutely hate someone or yourself, 'Bonsai' is well worth passing on, especially if you're eyeing this up solely for achievements (they're not worth it, trust me on this).