I'll be honest, UnderGarden is NOT the typical game we cover here on HolyFragger.com, but when we were approached to review the game, and learned a little more about it, we had to give it a shot.
You can't die, and it's impossible to fail (although you can reload checkpoints if you get stuck), so if you're a stat-tracking fanatic, you're out of luck.
You play as an undersea gardener exploring various caves attempting to grow a variety of different plant life. You gather pollen from green sacs that you find all over the undersea world you're exploring. As you swim past flowers with the sacs, the flora will bloom in any number of shapes and vivid colors, which dramatically alters the visual landscape.
You can also alter the undersea world of UnderGarden through music. Once you've made flowers bloom by passing over them with pollen, you can change their appearance further by gathering up musicians and bringing them close to the flora. Musicians have different instruments, and they not only change the flora that they travel past, they also change the music that you hear during the game.
The puzzles int he game help to break up the monotony, but the creativity of the puzzles is somewhat lacking in the first half of the game. The puzzles found in the later half of the game can be very entertaining, which makes you wonder why they didn't either make all of the puzzles like this, or spread them throughout the game better.
The UnderGarden is unlike most other games, in that the purpose of the game is to create, rather than to destroy. If you're looking for a game to cleanse the palette from the typical blood and gore you typically see in games, you should definitely look into UnderGarden.
UnderGarden is available now on Xbox LIVE for 800 Microsoft Points, and at Atari.com for Windows PC.