Mutazione
Review

Mutazione (2019) is a narrative adventure game where you play as a 15-year-old girl visiting her grandfather on a faraway island inhabited by friendly but mutated villagers. By finding seeds, tending to gardens and talking to people, you uncover a tightly knit web of characters with unrequited love, hidden trauma and difficult memories. By tending to the people as well as the gardens, you nudge the island towards processing its losses.

During the course of the game, you create and nurture your own garden. You gather seeds to plant in gardens to help heal the community around you. This reconnection to nature substantiates and undergirds the family reconciliation running through the narrative.

You can play this aspect of the game on its own if you wish in the Garden mode. Each plant carries the song of a specific instrument; those instruments are bound together into moods. Planting gardens that align with those moods will help you accomplish your narrative goal, as you build beautiful procedural ambient compositions.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Mutazione 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 5 months ago.