Contrary to popular belief, Ubisoft is actually really good at building convincing virtual worlds that are genuinely engaging to venture through. The main problem with a lot of their games, however, is that they’re designed around extraneous sets of obligations that the player has to fulfil rather than rewarding the exploration of their worlds in any meaningful way. In short, they tend to be a set of icons on a map rather than a map with content in it, and as such, playing through a lot of these games ultimately devolves into czeching items off a list. Somehow, Ubisoft Reflections managed to take Grow Home— a short, sweet, and linear game game about climbing up to the sky— and turn it into a bloated shadow of its former self that demonstrates this fundamental design problem better than almost any other game I’ve played. Grow Up isn’t a game with nearly enough substance to foster its open world. Part of what makes Grow Home so enjoyable is that it was short enough to make its minimalistic design feel worthwhile. There weren’t any items you had to go outta your way to collect, you were climbing up to the sky and discovering creatures and locations along the way that were interesting enough to pick up and examine. Grow Up takes this same philosophy and expands it into an open world where you have to collect everything across several mostly uninteresting biomes. B.U.D’s childlike, cluttered movement isn’t ideal for exploring an entire world, yet it is put front and centre in this game just like in Grow Home, but for a much longer and wider duration. Since this game shares DNA with its predecessor, it still has a sense of infectious charm for the first several hours, but its charm wears thin once the game stops being centred around exploration and starts being focused on collecting pieces around the bland world. That’s the primary problem with Grow Up, it’s built on a backbone of exploration, but its game loop is centred around clumsily walking across a world to fulfil an extraneous set of obligations. It is a Ubisoft open world without the strengths of Ubisoft’s world design. Grow Up is just the padding of an open world game, and if I wanted to experience that, I could just go to a grocery store I’ve never been to with someone else’s shopping list.