Mutazione: Gardening & Gossip

 I played this game at some point during this time period to give myself a break from school in 2020. Today, we’ll be talking about “Mutazione”. Not going to lie, when I first booted up the game I thought it was gonna be a scary game but I was pleasantly surprised!

Who made Mutazione?

Die Gute Fabrik, they are a Denmark-based company. Their website is here, where you'll find more of their games and what their goals are for making games.

How did you get Mutazione?

I'm not sponsored by Epic Games but they do free games every Thursday. Sometimes it has multiple games, sometimes it is expensive games, and sometimes it's diamond in the rough indie games like Mutazione.

What's Mutazione about?

You are the granddaughter coming to your mom's childhood home for the first time. The island where your mom grew up suffered a tragedy when your grandparents were young, resulting in the island and its inhabitants becoming genetically mutated. When you arrive, gramps isn't looking so well, saying the island is dying and gives you the task of restoring magic singing gardens around the island. You get to meet all of the townspeople, many of whom knew your mom and seem to miss her a lot. With a small town, comes hot town gossip and scandals. Let's just say the previously mentioned tragedy is not the only one to occur. When the night has come and the land is dark, you experience nightmares and a mysterious birdman visits you on multiple occasions.
Mutazione contains themes of broken family life, grief, uncertainties of life, and more.

Initial Feedback for Mutazione

• The story was very interesting. I like the overlapping storylines but I found the town's storyline to be more intriguing than the other one. It was nice to know who birdman was but that was really it. In the town's storyline, the devs had an opportunity to have you question certain plot points. I think it would have been more powerful if you had specific ages for all the townspeople. In my head, I pictured Tung and Miu in their 20-30s which is young but that would put people like Claire and Ailin in their 40-50's with Bopek being the youngest and grandpa, Yoko, or grandma being the oldest.
  
• It was so much easier to follow what your journal said rather than wander aimlessly.
  
• I relate to Nonno.
  
• I liked collecting all the plants, making the garden, and meeting all the neighbors are equally important aspects of gameplay. 
  
• In many dialogue choice games, it is hard to truly allow for choice, as it creates a giant tree of choices and as a developer, you really only want to have one story so you have to make choices limited so that you can have one cohesive story (this could be a whole post so comment below if you'd be interested). In this game, I don't know if my choices mattered for dialogue but I didn't do multiple playthroughs.
  
• The dots are really cute but I wish over time their dialogue was translated so you could understand what they were saying.
  
• I loved all the distinctive neighbors and the general layout of the island. Jell-a is my favorite.
  
• Really lovely soundtrack
  
• The art style is minimalist and has muted colors which make it feel like a really relaxing experience.
  

Final Thoughts

Overall Die Gute Fabrik y'all did a great job, I can't believe more people haven't played this game. Thank you for reading my take on Mutazione: an indie game, I appreciate it. Comment below if you want to play this game. If you like my content, consider subscribing to my mailing list and if you want another indie game review, click here.