Escaping to ‘Mutazione’ Island
I recently felt like I needed a quick vacation from massive 50+ hour games, and Mutazione was the perfect getaway. Mutazione reinvigorated my spirits, creating a relaxing but compelling narrative adventure through one of the most gorgeous 2D environments I’ve seen in an indie game. Though I knew I would love Mutazione for the art style, I didn’t anticipate being deeply moved by intricate plots and mature themes. In just a few short hours, Mutazione grew its way up to create a gorgeous canopy of gaming experiences that I won’t soon forget.
The game establishes clear relationships and power dynamics with sharply written dialogue in the introduction. You briefly control Kai, the protagonist of the game, who bids farewell to her mother. This relationship between Kai and her mother is immediately inverted by the dialogue present in the scene, revealing that Kai takes care of her mother more often than her mother takes care of Kai. This has caused Kai to grow up quickly, leading to this farewell scene on a dock as Kai boards a ferry boat headed towards Mutazione island, where her grandfather has become bedriddenly ill, dying.
A Compelling Premise
From the outset, Mutazione is deliberately limited with player agency. At first, Kai only responds to dialogue passively. You are given some brief opportunities to decide how you would like to reply to Graubert, the captain of the ferry boat, who talks over Kai and demeaningly nicknames her against her will. Driven away by Kai’s lack of conversational power, she opts to spend her time on the deck of the ship. Here is where the game once again limits agency, as a welcoming but pensive song plays, montaging the setting sun as Kai ferries her way to Muzione island – alone in a strange land she’s only heard of.
As beautiful as Mutazione island is, what brings this island to life is the copious charm exuded by the game’s small cast of characters. The game smartly distinguishes dialogue physically on screen, almost like a rolling series of text messages going back and forth through dialogue. It also color codes the text from each character to as to easily associate who is speaking in a crowded scene featuring all of the island’s villagers. No two villagers look alike, ostensibly owing to the isolated mutations taking place on the titular island. Contrast the hulking green giant called Tung with the slender anthropomorphic cat named Miu, for example, two of Kai’s early friends made on the island. These two characters have fundamentally different personalities, as reflected in their character designs, and it was easy for me to associate each character distinctly without ever confusing them with each other.
Mutazione was designed with multiple platforms in mind, so this game can be played on a touchscreen, a mouse and keyboard, or a gamepad, which is how I played. Controlling Kai is slow but never tedious, as Mutazione island consists of roughly ten locations to explore. Performance was never an issue whatsoever and load times were instantaneous. It’s worth commending a game developed by such a small team for polishing off their game across multiple platforms, for this could have very easily been a clunky mess with the multiple depths within each 2D environment.
The core gameplay loop of Mutazione may consist of Kai running between various locations on the island to speak with specific villagers, enabling various dialogue choices along the way. These choices often made me feel like I was steering between two very different versions of Kai: meek or blunt, humble or prideful, nosy or aloof. But Mutazione would not quite have grown to fruition within my heart if not for the incredibly peaceful and relaxing gardening mechanic.
Papu Flowers for the Fung
Early on in the story, Kai is introduced to a horrible, predatory bird who offers confusing prophetic jargon as a warning to her as she arrives at the island. Many evenings on the island, Kai is plagued by nightmares featuring this ominous bird, waking up in fright and confessing her worries to people on the island from time to time. Over the course of the narrative unfolding, it becomes increasingly clear that this bird is associated with a mysterious spiritual force binding to the Papu tree. The Papu tree might be thought of akin to the Hometree from Avatar, a spiritual force uniting the ecosystem of the island, serving a shamanistic home for many living within the tree. This tree is bound with an ancient spiritual force known as the Fung, which at first appears deadly and threatening. I never felt as though I could trust the prophecy and lore that shrouded the island, even as I began to understand it more by the end.
The game doesn’t reveal this true depth regarding the Papu tree and the Fung to the player right away, but your ultimate goal of gameplay is to tend seven spiritual gardens that represent peaks of human emotion like melancholy and wanderlust. These gardens were formerly tended by your now bedridden grandfather, the shaman of the island. One of the first things Kai’s grandfather requests from her is to restore the potted garden on the rooftop of his house. As someone who spent many years working within horticulture, I was delighted to discover this mechanic.
At first, gardening might be easy to mess up – or at least it was for me. I quickly overcrowded each gardening location, stunting the growth of my plants and wondering why they weren’t growing to the height indicated in their botanical profile. Kai’s grandfather teaches her a shamanistic song that she can play on a hand-drum, accelerating the growth rate of the seeds she plants. In this instance, once I removed some of the overcrowded seeds, giving large plants like an Australian Tree Fern room to grow, the whole garden came to life. This music that Kai plays is meditative and always matches the atmosphere to the mood that corresponds to each garden.
As you create and complete each of these mood gardens, the history of the Papu tree and the Fung slowly becomes clear. The game cleverly introduces you to these gardens as the capstone to the villagers’ chapters where you meet, befriend, and adventure with characters like Miu in her hidden swimming spot. In these character adventures, you learn of the tragic backstory that everyone shares on Mutazione island. Sometimes the tragedy was the death of a child, or being abandoned by a father, but no one – except the dots – has escaped trauma on the island.
Uniting Mutazione Island with its Characters
Kai’s grandfather’s deathly ill state slowly improves as she restores the mood gardens, building relationships with the villagers, and checking in on people that her grandfather is concerned about having let down. The more that the island’s backstory comes to the fore, it becomes clear that her grandfather’s condition is directly linked to the health of the island. The health of the island is directly linked to the Papu tree, the health of which has fallen into disrepair due to the abandonment of the mood gardens. All of Kai’s actions are intertwined like branches through the relationships she builds, the gardens she designs, and the invigoration she provides both her grandfather and the island itself through her restoration of the Papu tree. I felt like every action I was taking through Kai was contributing to individual characters and the broader island as a whole, which gave meaning to the entire experience.
As Kai’s relationships with the villagers progress, some of the stories become shockingly sober and contemporarily relevant – something you might not expect from a friendly island village game about gardening. The game only ever briefly veers into dark territory, but the whimsical and wholesome nature that Mutazione’s art style presents is deeply contrasted by the heavy themes present in the dialogue. One scene in particular sticks with me, where Ailin, a character who runs the salon and bathhouse on the island, confesses to Graubert that the baby she is pregnant with is not his. The dramatic irony of the player knowing this information much in advance of Graubert does not diminish the gut punch that he receives in this exchange. This information leaves him in disbelief, denial, and insecurity. Later that same night, Kai finds him drunk at the bar, prone to embarrass himself in front of the entire island.
Though Mutazione hits heavy notes, it always rounds things back towards optimism and positivity. Even the game’s melancholic ending, a farewell from your brief stay as Kai on Mutazione island, feels like an earned victory – a noble departure from a job well done. Though the game may lean into vague coming of age tropes throughout, as Kai is only a 15 year old girl, I never felt like I was being browbeaten with teenage realizations about one’s place in the world. Rather, by focusing on the broken, traumatized lives of so many of these kind villagers, Kai’s development is vicariously shown through the advancement of other characters.
It’s also worth noting that although Mutazione is extremely meaningful to me as a game and story, it greatly benefits from the brief moments of comic relief peppered throughout the experience. The island’s many “dots” – whether in dot form, hot dog form, or otherwise – have nonsensical conversations in a made up language consisting of monosyllabic syllables like “nit,” “tik,” and “du.” Kai just seems to be able to understand them, and no effort is made to help the player understand the language – only absurdly specific dialogue choices result from these interactions. Furthermore, some of the other dots have hilarious animations and off-the-wall conversations about enterprise and consumer demand. As much as I valued the sincerity of Mutazione, the comic relief brought everything home along the way.
The brilliance of Mutazione to me can be reduced to a tiny poem within the game. Early on, I received a prophecy that was entirely nonsensical: “Seven gardens / Mood is sung, / Papu flowers / For the Fung.” After reading this article, you might already have some idea where this brief poem leads the player. At the time, however, I didn’t know there were seven gardens to maintain, I didn’t know they were associated with mood songs, I had no clue what Papu flowers were, and I thought the Fung wasn’t even a word. By the end of the game, this poem could not be more clear: Kai must fill seven gardens and sing the musical melody associated with those plants’ moods; once these gardens are complete, the Papu tree will flower, and Kai needs to bring one flower to the Fung, hidden in an underground lair on the island. In just a few short hours, my brain went from completely puzzled to completely confident in my interpretation of the prophecy, and I credit the game with drip feeding clues so far in advance.
Like Kai, I was reluctant to leave Mutazione island behind. I deeply empathize with the lives and predicaments of its villagers and their ceaseless grasping for meaning. In the fews days since completing the game, I have started turning on the soothing soundtrack of the game during hours of concentration or rest, where instantly I feel back in the gardens once more. I crave yet another playthrough, and yet I know that like all coming of age stories, part of the lesson includes being able to leave it behind. Especially in a time of social crisis where leaving one’s home is a risky activity, Mutazione was the perfect escape.
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