{"id":11616,"date":"2026-08-19T10:39:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T00:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=11616"},"modified":"2026-10-23T10:58:42","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T00:58:42","slug":"tree-planter-chill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2026\/08\/19\/tree-planter-chill\/","title":{"rendered":"Tree Planter: Chill."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There’s a pattern I’ve seen in myself over the last couple years: I don’t do well with games without hard goals. I feel like I’ve always known this somewhat intrinsically as open world games have always been less appealing than their more focused, some would say more constrained<\/em> games that give you direct purpose rather than a sandbox to play in. It’s probably also why I can’t remember the last time I played an Ubisoft game although, looking at their revenue figures, I guess I’m not the only one alone in that respect. That’s probably why even though the idea of Treeplanter appealed to me on many levels (it’s environmental contributions being no small part of that) I found myself mostly listlessly clicking away for a short while before I closed it for good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The premise is simple: this is a diorama game where you’ll build out your own forest using a set of premade assets and, along the way, you’ll be peppered with the sounds of nature, facts about the flora and fauna and serenaded by an incredible backing soundtrack. There’s a bunch of premade environments for you to choose from, each of which you’re free to much around with, tear down and remake it as your own as you see fit. You’re also given a bunch of tools to change the time of day, seasons and even the colour palette to some extend, opening up the options of making some truly surreal landscapes if that’s what you desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I won’t make any claims of being an inspired artist so whilst I definitely enjoyed the chill half hour or so I had with Treeplanter I can’t say I found much pulling me back once I’d closed it down. I can definitely see those who love playing around in say Wallpaper Engine or similar tools losing hours to this, creating all sorts of weird and wonderful landscapes that go far beyond the handful of nice looking but ultimately quite barren pieces I put together. That being said I don’t feel like I didn’t get my money’s worth though: I wanted a distraction and I got one. Plus a tree got planted somewhere because of it, I could it all as an absolute win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I might not have spent much time with Treeplanter but it did exactly what it said it would. I got to plant trees, make some cool looking images and managed to get the dopamine fiend at bay for a short while. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in keeping it to myself now that I think about it. My kids can lose hours on making all sorts of weird pieces of craft so I can imagine they’d lose similar amounts of time with something like this. In any case I count it as $6 well spent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rating: 7.0\/10 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Treeplanter is available on PC for $5.95. Total playtime was approximately 30 minutes. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a pattern I’ve seen in myself over the last couple years: I don’t do well with games without hard goals. I feel like I’ve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,16],"tags":[6845,6469,6844,1726,6441,733,1141,3715,6449],"class_list":["post-11616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games","category-review","tag-diorama","tag-future-friends-games","tag-henry-driver","tag-indie","tag-nature","tag-pc","tag-sandbox","tag-simulation","tag-singleplayer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-31m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Treeplanter-Review-Screenshot-Wallpaper-Title-Screen-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1067&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11620,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11616\/revisions\/11620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}