▲ Recommended
12 hrs
It's a really great game. Here’s some thoughts I had about it at 2am after playing it for 12 hours straight.
The art style is cute (and cohesive across the entire experience; stylized, highly saturated, and low-poly, which is something I prefer heavily to something trying for realism), the music is unobtrusive, and the gameplay loop feels like a day at the casino. It has a simple, somewhat cliché psychological “horror” story you can choose whether or not you engage with, and after some post-release hotfixes, really excellent controls that make the game feel good to play.
I bought the game this morning, sat down to play it, and got every achievement in around 12 hours in a single play session. And now I'm writing this. What a day!
Like me, most people that picked up this game saw someone (Jerma? Vinny? A secret third handsome funnyman on the internet?) play a few minutes, thought, ohhhhh that looks fun, picked it up for eleven bucks*, and played it for themselves. If you loved Orteil's Cookie Clicker (which is still around, by the way. I have a 2,379 day long run on the mobile app version going currently) or any of the incremental clicker-type games it popularized, or if you loved the "selling plorts" part of Slime Rancher specifically, or to get even more comparative, if you liked Katamari Damacy, Donut County, or A Game About Digging A Hole… This one is for you. It’s quintessential Number Go Up, with cute Berries that make more Berries and a big ominous hole in the ground. And yes, bananas ARE berries, even if you don’t like to think about it.
*cost depends on your local currency, this is in "Earth Dollars"
You might’ve seen me put “horror” in quotes a couple paragraphs ago (I just did it again there to remind you), and you also might’ve seen the game has the “Psychological Horror” tag on it. I think this game is still suitable for anyone sensitive to horror or dark themes; I definitely wouldn’t consider it “scary”, moreso that its story does have some of the topics present in a lot of the games currently popular in this scene. The “Edutainment/Mascot Horror”-type themes certainly aren’t out of place and aren’t unwelcome either; I actually am a fan of this stuff, but with the gameplay loop being what drew me in I didn’t exactly want an overbearing story to take away from my Berry-based action game.
I wasn’t disappointed. In classic indie horror fashion the story is told through audio notes, and the voice actor does a great job embodying the character; you do get a feel for the type of person Donna is once you’ve heard her tell her story. There’s enough exposition that you get everything you need to understand what happened, but not so much that you feel beaten to death with it, as you often do with these types of games. And, as previously stated, you’re given the choice to engage – the story is not so baked in that you’re forced to be fully rapt with attention for each cutscene and note. The puzzles in the game are simple (shoutout to Blue Prince) and don’t require you to analyze the cassette tapes, and cutscenes are minimal, only reserved for the game’s endings. New Game + gives you the option to skip cutscenes entirely. The game knows you’re here for Berries. And it respects that.
I do want to say something about the story, though, so this part is spoiler heavy:
There’s something here that’s not entirely lost on me. The story’s simple enough. A woman with a dream to write, direct, and star (literally) in her own children’s show, kneecapped by a producer claiming to be acting on behalf of studio executives to cut costs. This is the crux of it. She takes her anger out on him by killing him, realizes she’s crumbling under the pressure from the cops, and burns the studio down. Everything that comes after, with the kidnapped people being turned into objects, that part isn’t important for me – I want to talk about the first part. First of all, I reject the idea that all art (“art”, here, always includes video games) must include some “hidden”, deeper meaning to have value. I think the surface-level message that’s in the story here has just as much value as if it were hidden; I don’t think this game needs a 4 hour “deep dive” video by a YouTuber to prove that its story is valuable. I think it sends an incredibly clear message: there are people out there that have stories to tell that can’t tell them because no one is willing to invest in them. And that’s pretty clear to me considering this game was developed by a single person! It’s a hell of a lot of work to put your entire mind, soul, and body into a piece of art, to pour yourself into something you really believe in. And then to release it into the world. And hope people want to share in it with you.
How did Donna feel, when people told her Ms Rainbow was “scary”? When cost-cutting measures were coming in. When Barry was putting pressure on her. When she was being replaced. No, she shouldn’t have killed him. Obviously. But this is a fictional story, where we stretch real feelings we, as humans, have had into extremes to release catharsis; have you, reader, ever made something and shared it, and gotten negative feedback? Have you ever wanted to lash out and instead swallowed your feelings?
To Donna, it didn’t matter if the show was good or not. It was hers.
But I think there’s more here.
In the real world, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lost a significant amount of funding from the American government and dissolved entirely last month. As a result, PBS, the Public Broadcast System, a nonprofit, educational television network that received a large amount of funding from the corporation, is also struggling. It’s the home for Sesame Street, the most widely-watched children’s television broadcast in North America, and due to significant cuts, many people in rural areas have lost access to it entirely.
Stories today about lack of funding destroying access to education hit a little harder, cut a little deeper – the climate for art is harsh and brutal, truly, and we’re all desperate for escapism, but it’s impossible to make art without also bleeding into it. This same message was present in John & Evan Szymanski’s My Friendly Neighborhood albeit much more heavily leaning into the themes of a defunded PBS but nevertheless two peas in the same children’s television network pod (peas – not berries. But they ARE fruit! I didn’t forget that this is a game about Berries).
Showrunners are forced to make the budget cuts, to cheapen their work for the executives to save money. Entire shows, channels, networks, corporations are shuttered, all to save money. The passion, the love, the care; all of it means nothing, because none of it saves money. Everything in life now is being cheapened to save money. You’ve noticed how it’s all gotten worse. Advertisements and packaging are all AI generated so companies don’t have to pay graphic designers or copy writers anymore. Job listings are all fake, written with ChatGPT by companies that aren’t actually hiring; they just need the listings up to make it look like they are. Libraries, health services, community centers, parks: all losing funding. To save money. So the money can go somewhere else. Somewhere that isn’t here, somewhere that isn’t improving lives in a material way.
At the end of Berry Bury Berry, a blurb reads: “Berry Bury Berry was proudly made without AI Gen’d assets. Art by humans, for humans.”
I think sometimes art can be about more than one thing at a time. Maybe the developer didn’t mean to say anything with this. Maybe they wanted to make a funny game about Berries. And I think they succeeded. But its overarching themes are clear to any inanimate object with eyes – if things continue as they are, and people are denied the freedom to tell the stories they need told, then something’s going to give. And it won’t all be berries and rainbows.
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