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TGS 2018: Hands-On with ‘Plantan’, a Twist on the Idle Tapper

I’ll start by admitting upfront that I’m not a big fan of the idle tapper genre. I can totally see the appeal, but this isn’t a genre that usually flicks my switches, so to speak. When I first saw Plantan, an upcoming game from Japanese independent developer Morphon, what immediately struck me was its lovely artwork and its intriguing story set-up. Who is this mysterious creature? What is the object she has found, and why is it there? I started poking away at this game, as one is wont to at shows like these where instructions are often not given, and quickly determined it to be an idle tapper of sorts. Hm.

Except it’s not exactly an idle tapper even when it is being an idle tapper. There are two main resources in play here. Your aim is to collect electricity to power the mysterious artifact the alien girl has found. But to even begin harvesting that electricity, you need to gather up some cubes to buy the objects that will generate it. Cubes can be gathered by shooting the balloons that carry them overhead. You’ll actually have to aim to hit them which, while not being an arduous task, certainly isn’t mindless. Once you’ve picked up enough cubes to buy a generator, you can start powering up the mystery object. Gathering more cubes will let you buy new generators or enhance your existing ones, a progression mechanic likely familiar to most.

So what happens when you finally have enough juice to power the object? Well, it turns out to be a game device of some sort. It throws you immediately into an auto-scrolling runner/shooter of sorts, and you need to try to get as far as you can before running out of battery power. As it begins to wane, the screen will dim and flicker. When it runs out, it’s back to the fields to charge it up again. As you progress in both the harvesting and action mini-games, more of the story will slowly be revealed. I didn’t get a chance to see very far into it, but I’m quite intrigued by what I did see. You can check out a chunk of the gameplay in the included video.

Plantan is on track for a release either later this year or in early 2019. The current version is already in both Japanese and English, so Western players shouldn’t have to wait long at all for the game when it finally does come out. It may look like a simple idle game, but the little story snippets, variety of gameplay mechanics, and the game’s steady approach to scientific ideas make it one worth looking out for. It was one of my favorites from the indie area of the Tokyo Game Show.