Call it the circle of surreal life.
If you can just keep the Pretztails from stalking your Bunnycombs for a while, you might have the chance to get your Whirlms to mate so that you’ll have some food to get your Sparriwmints to reproduce.
In the goofy world of “Viva Piñata,” tending a garden takes real coordination and a Dr. Seuss-like sense of science to succeed. In a land where piñatas hatch from paper eggs and require care, feeding and a place to live, challenge comes with carefree chuckles. Leaving behind the sorts of save-the-world heroics that dominate game narratives, the art of raising piñatas favors an open-ended approach to fun. The game goads you along to sow a happy garden, but how and why remain up to the player’s imagination.
Combining the sandbox dynamics of the Sims with the collectibility and cryptozoology of Pokémon, “Viva Piñata” works more like a toy than an objective-oriented game. Starting out with a junk-filled field, players work the ground, clearing debris and preparing to woo wild piñatas into the plot.
Plant enough grass, for example, and a goofy-looking snake piñata, the Syrupent, will wriggle onto the scene. If the critter likes what he finds, he’ll decide to stay for a bit. If you can lure a Mousemallow there, then the snake will snack happily on his fellow papier-maché creature and make your garden home.
Build a serpent house, and if you catch a pair of Syrupents in the mood, you can entice them to do the “romance dance,” which leads to baby piñatas. With a little salsa music and crazy dance-floor gyrations, a storklike creature delivers a little bundle of joy.
Naming your tame piñatas and tracking their progress through an in-game journal provide plenty of smiles, while defending your creatures and garden from interlopers and breaking up spats between angry beasts takes up most of your time. Along the way, you accumulate chocolate coins that are tradable for garden supplies, services and seeds for sprouting new foliage. Careful management of your crops provides a good balance of seeds for the next round of planting and extras for turning into quick cash.
The seeming simplicity of raising piñatas masks the more complex web of pseudo-life that underlies that game. Predator-prey relationships govern who wants to eat whom. A day-night cycle determines when certain piñatas will come out to play, and a network of ecological dependencies and conflicts keeps the piñata wrangler busy trying to balance his or her Garden of Eden.
As peculiar a premise as it is, “Viva Piñata” shows the potential for games to transport players far away from the humdrum, even while leaving them on the treadmill of routine tasks.
“Viva Piñata”
VIDEO GAME|For Xbox 360|$49.99|Rated E for everyone
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