Trees of Life

I sometimes like to pretend I am an over-worked, high-flying executive, perhaps enjoying long trans-Atlantic flights on 747s - in Business Class, of course. And were I one of these lucky few, I am sure I would have a desk somewhere in the world covered in executive stress relief toys, you know the type, little steel balls suspended on strings that bang into one another in a relaxing way, soft nose indoor darts that can be thrown at an effigy of my boss and a basketball hoop suspended on the back of my office door. These are all well and good, but what is a high flying executive to do when he is sipping complimentary drinks on that trans-Atlantic flight?

Well, I believe that this game might just be the answer. I kicked back in my pretend business class seat and prepared to be relaxed. First thing I noticed was the lack of any complicated or confusing menus or option screens. In fact, no option screen of any sort presented itself, instead I found myself straight into the game. Uh oh, this might not be as relaxing as I hoped. But then a soft chirping of crickets instead of background music started to lull me back to my relaxed state.

I touched the little red circle on the screen, moved it a little and suddenly a great silhouette of a tree grew itself before my eyes, covered some little shiny dots which slowly slid themselves down the centre of my new tree and I scored some points. Simple. My beautiful new tree suddenly disappeared and I was presented with more shiny little dots. After a little planning, but not too much as this is supposed to be relaxing after all, I worked out how to place the red circles to encourage my tree to grow once again to cover the shiny blue orbs. Sometimes my efforts were rewarded with a beautiful array of branches covering the screen, and hopefully the blue shiny things too, and other times I found my creations to be stunted and ugly, and missing the targets completely. But I started to relax and play a little with the game, which is exactly what it wants you to do with it.

This is a fun little title. There really isn't much too it, the graphics are minimalistic but as an executive stress relief toy that you can take from your desk and play on the go, it works rather well.