My mom has a story about me. When I was around 5 years old, she took me (as she regularly did) to the community garden plot she tended. While she took care of the tomatoes, zucchini, and beans, I wandered throughout the garden, peeking in at other people’s plots.
Being a five-yearish-old kid with five-yearish-old grabby & grubby hands, “wandering throughout the garden” was actually code for “shoving everything into my mouth that I possibly could.” I was an indiscriminate, tottering Godzilla, whose destruction was only stopped when one of the things I shoved into my mouth was a hot pepper.
I can still get my mom to laugh as she recalls me running back to her, with red-hot saliva stains coming down from the sides of my mouth and a wild look of regret on my tiny face.
My family is a family of tenders: beekeepers and gardeners and handyfolks. I grew up sitting in gardens. I watched my grandmother — my babcia — as she buried scraps from fish dinners in the soil, or nursed even the saddest plant back to good health. My mom, at one point, tended no fewer than three gardens. My aunt keeps bees, and will send me 1-liter jars of honey in the mail which, I maintain, is a near cure-all for whatever ails ya.
Besides my one mistaken foray with the hot pepper, I, too, love a garden. I rarely feel as good as I do when I have my hands in dirt.
Gardens are intensely personal. Plants only gain the title of “garden” when they are being actively tended, whether that be by human or, say, leaf-cutter ants. That hot pepper I indiscriminately grabbed as a kid was grown by someone who wanted it there at that moment, perhaps a lover of spicy foods. It wasn’t intended for me; I was the outside audience, reaching in and grabbing what I assumed was mine by virtue of seeing it and wanting it.
Mutazione by Die Gute Fabrik
Mutazione (a game with a slightly undefined pronunciation) was released by Die Gute Fabrik in September. It bills itself as an adventure game and “mutant soap opera.” But it’s also a game about gardening, and what it means to a community.
You play as Kai, a 15-year-old girl who has been encouraged to go to the island of Mutazione by her mother. Kai’s estranged grandfather, Nono, is very ill, and this is perhaps Kai’s last chance to meet him. The island itself has mostly been abandoned by the outside world; a meteor hit the place years before, killing most of the inhabitants, and mutating the local flora, fauna, and the few humans that survived. So, the community is small and incredibly tight-knit, built in the beautiful and cavernous ruins of what remains behind (a broken highway here, an old shopping mall there).
The main form of “action” is directing Kai around the island to talk to people. She’s there for a week, and the locals are thrilled to have her, since Kai’s mother left the island when she was quite young. Kai checks in on folks and learns the local gossip (of which there is plenty).
It seems that Nono’s illness has thrown the place out of whack; he used to plant gardens around the island and provide herbal remedies to the folks in town. Now his gardens, and the community itself, are overgrown and in need of care. Kai overhears stories of marital trouble, of people still recovering from old and deep trauma, of secret love.
At his suggestion, Kai starts planting gardens in place of Nono. She finds she has a special aptitude for it, just like her grandfather. As the player explores the island, they can direct Kai to collect seeds from local plants. Each plant has needs: this one likes rocky soil, that one only grows underground.
Mutazione has a lovely little game mechanic trick to bypass the tricky real-life reality of gardening: that it requires a lot of waiting for things to sprout and grow. Instead, Kai is gifted a drum by her grandfather. Playing a tune on the drum that aligns with the nature of the plants in the plot — euphoria, or wanderlust, or melancholy, or, or, or — causes the plants to grow in great spurts.
I found great joy in playing the little drum over and over, and watching the plants bloom and thrive around me. I took my responsibility very seriously: I’d gather seeds from the ones getting old, or repot the ones that were growing too big for their container. I planted the flowers into pleasing arrays of colors or just made it a wild jungle of plants.
As the plants reached maturity, they each produced a soft instrumental sound. Planting a group that all attuned to the same emotion meant that they were all in natural harmony. Sometimes, I would sit among the plants for minutes on end, just enjoying the sounds of my garden. Other times, I would pass by that same plot days later to find a villager seated among the plants, listening to the sound of that emotion — euphotic, or wanderlust, or melancholy, or, or, or — that they needed to hear in order for them to process and heal whatever wounds had been left to overgrow.
Early in the game, the player learns that Kai’s grandfather was an outsider to the island… is an outsider. He’s not a mutant, but came to the island with his cohort of fellow scientists, intending to study the local population. The scientists weren’t seen positively; they saw and used the island’s mutant inhabitants as test subjects. Nono eventually abandoned that initiative, instead choosing to stay and support the community, becoming a shaman-like figure in the village.
He became the gardener.
Mutazione, in its subtle way, asks what it means to be the gardener of a space that isn’t really yours. On the one hand, it’s a way to give tenderness and support: you give absolute focus to a space, recognizing what can live there, and what will thrive; you come back, day after day, and care for its needs; you show up. On the other hands, gardening isn’t free from colonialist or imperialist overtones: the gardener chooses what plants will be grown in the space, regardless of whether they are native to the area or not; it’s a way of putting one’s will forward (“I want to grow hot peppers, because I like hot peppers”); it’s a way of claiming space for oneself.
The game balances these two equal but opposite forces. There was a moment I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable with Kai’s grandfather and his shamanistic role. I mean, he was an outsider and yet positioned himself as the center of religious knowledge on the island? C’mon.
Then, I chatted with the local archivist in town, an older mutant named Yoké who was protective towards Kai. When Kai mentioned her grandfather’s upcoming plans — ones that involved a journey to a spirit realm that was notably risky — Yoké got uncharacteristically angry, yelling “IT’S NOT EVEN HIS TO DO.”
It was a short moment, quickly apologized for. A flash in the pan. But it showed that the game’s writers had an eye on the give and take inherent in being a gardener of a space. Gardening can be an incredible way to give back to space. However, there always exists a glimmer that, by giving time and energy to a plot of land, that you can make it yours. There’s a thin emotional line between being a caretaker of a space, and the owner of it.
True story: I did cry during this scene. I, too, feel most like me in the water.
Here, in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re moving firmly into fall. Trees are losing their leaves and plants are putting their energy into their roots in order to make it through the colder months.
During the winter, bees will cluster in the center of their hive, in a giant ball. They will move from the inside to the outside of this ball, to ensure that no one bee is too cold or too warm. Some will die from the weather, but most will live, thanks to the rest of their hive and their inborn knowledge that, by abiding some cold now, they will have the chance to be warm later.
Mutazione is the perfect game for this season. It’s deliberately slow and expansive. Much of the gameplay is moving from place to place to talk with members of the community. The repetition allows the island to become familiar: you know you can find Miu in her treehouse at night, or Spike getting ready for a morning swim at dawn. As Kai continues to grow new gardens, the place becomes familiar for that reason as well. You see the plants you chose to grow, and see the local folks enjoying their verdant company. Gardening becomes a way to make things familiar, and to become familiar to those in the garden.
The game is also is like bees during the winter. Each character is an individual, but they are reliant on the community in order to survive. The story is about Kai, learning about this community and becoming a part of it. But it’s also about her grandfather, Nono, who most directly feels the tension between asserting individuality and being a part of the group. It’s only through seeing Kai’s gardens that he — and we — re-learn to tend.