A perfect plan

Every summer of his childhood, Nico got sent to his grandparents' orchard to pick fruit up off the ground. Apples mostly. He hated it, and he never once said so, because Trudi and Klaus were so pleased to have him there that it seemed easier to tell them it was the best part of his year. He must have been convincing. They believed it for about twenty years.

Now they're too old to keep the place going, so they've signed it over to him. As far as they're concerned it's the nicest thing anyone has ever done for anybody.

He thanked them properly. He did not mention what he was actually thinking, which was that he now owned the worst summers of his life, in writing.

So he made a plan. Collect every last piece of fruit, sell all of it, sell the orchard, and never touch an apple again.

The plan survives about twenty minutes. Somewhere between the first full basket and the sight of a patch of grass with nothing whatsoever left on it, something goes wrong, and Nico starts having a good time.

The orchard does not stay empty

Clearing all six gardens finishes season one. Season two starts straight afterwards and it starts faster, and before it does you get dealt cards that change how it plays. A bigger basket. More reach on the grabber. Robots that don't slack off. One card just quietly lowers the workbench prices for the rest of the season, which sounds boring until you do the arithmetic. Twenty of them so far, and from season six on you're picking ten at a time.

The numbers move with you. Bare hands get you a piece or two at a time. By the end of a run the fruit vacuum is pulling in twenty-five a second, the last garden has seventy-nine thousand peaches lying in it, and you will clear that too.

Nico's plan was to do this once.

Two ways to clear an orchard

Both work, and the game has no opinion about which one you pick.

Switch your head off. Walk around, hold the button, watch a lawn empty. Nothing here runs on a timer, nothing can be failed, nothing is chasing you, and nobody minds if you stop and look at the trees for a while. Buy whichever upgrade has the nicest icon. Leave a robot working one garden while you wander off into another. You can play this badly for two hours and still finish it, which is not an accident.

Or take it apart. Keep collecting without a break and a streak builds; the pace steps up, the sound climbs with it, and at the top it tips over into FRENZY. Clear a quarter of a garden cleanly and it pays out for the rest of the run. Which tool suits which density, when to sell, which upgrade to buy before which other one: none of that is obvious, and all of it gets measured. The records screen remembers your best pick rate, your longest flow, how long you held Frenzy, how far you walked, and what share of the work each tool did. There are leaderboards for when you think you've solved it.

Both are built on the same idea. Every few seconds the game should be handing you something, rather than asking something of you: a basket filling up, a patch of grass going bare, a number you didn't have a minute ago. Nothing here is testing you. It's meant to be the thing you put on after a bad day, and to still be worth the two hours.

In the game

• Six gardens, each with its own fruit and its own robot that keeps working while you're somewhere else.

• Three tools and a workbench full of upgrades, priced so that buying one means not buying another.

• Twelve rare finds, two per fruit, mixed in among the ordinary ones. The collection fills up as you turn them up.

• Mastery goals for every garden, if clearing one isn't enough for you.

• Steam achievements and leaderboards.

• A cozy mode that hides the speed readouts and the record pop-ups, and collecting on a toggle instead of a button you hold down.

• Ten languages, all of them voiced and subtitled, plus a colour-blind mode, free key rebinding and scalable text.

And then?

“Funny,” Nico says, somewhere in the sixth garden. “I thought I'd be happier about finishing.”

He could sell the place now. That was the plan. He's not going to sell the place, and you knew that before he did.