Trees Inc. - Review -

Trees Inc. is the latest title by studio Mobmonks and published by MadOctopus who specialize in indie titles on Steam.

Trees Inc. is, without a doubt, the most relaxing and slow-paced time management simulator I’ve tried. It’s the perfect innocent addiction. A classic idle-clicker which makes it the perfect activity to spend on lazy afternoons.

THE GAME

The title’s story and mechanics are straightforward without the need for a big tutorial. The gameplay is intuitive and does a great job easing you in gradually, giving you enough time to learn the basics and to think about your strategy.

THE STORY

As the name suggests, you are a tree-cutting enterprise, and you, as the player, must control the resource management. Your goal is to cut trees and gather logs. You are not alone in this as you have people helping you, though you need to be strategic in how to use them.

GAMEPLAY

The game takes place in seasons. You start in the summer and your screen shows a green field. You see a tree in the middle of it and you instantly understand that it needs to be chopped. By clicking on it, you start chopping. When the tree is chopped you can hold your mouse over it to water and regrow the tree. Once it grows, you can chop it again.

That way you increase your wood resources and as soon as you have enough you can plant more trees and start getting workers.

Your goal, as you may have guessed, is to gather as much wood as you can and grow your enterprise. Additionally, as your wood stash increases, you can unlock upgrades for your workers. You can increase their walking speed, their tree-cutting speed and their growth speed.

You need to assign these upgrades strategically for optimum efficiency. One thing that makes the upgrades both in personnel and in their skill upgrades important is that the trees get planted randomly in your field, so you can’t control their placement. It would be nice to plant them close to each other to reduce the walking distance, but you don’t have that option. The game makes that a bit challenging by spawning trees randomly whenever you want to plant a new one. It could be next to your existing tree or on either of the four edges of your screen.

As you progress you also gather Prestige points. When the Prestige bar is completed, you can unlock the next season and it’s actually possible to unlock all of them in a matter of a couple of hours.

You can also think of Prestige like your skill tree as you would in a classic RPG title. Once your Prestige bar is full you get one Prestige point to spend on your skills that will enhance your current abilities.

Keep in mind, however, that once you spend your Prestige points, your current operation will finish and you will start from scratch on the new unlocked season. So Prestige points have a double role: one to help you build your skill tree and the other to help you unlock a new season.

Gathering Prestige points gets harder in every season, but you would expect a level of difficulty on each new level.

Use the weather elements

As for the seasons, the default starting season is summer. Then you have monsoon, spring, winter and fall.

Each season comes with its own characteristics. My favourite was the monsoon season because I didn’t have to worry about watering my trees. I didn’t have to do it myself, nor did I need a water person. The constant rain was doing it for me automatically. Spring is another good option as it gives you more rewards compared to the other seasons.

More trees

Another thing that happened as I was gathering wood like crazy, well on my way to unlock the next season, was that I also unlocked a new tree. Besides the starting Pine tree, I now had access to the oak tree. Oak trees unlock their own type of lumberjacks and growers. And of course they produce more wood. So even though this is an idle-clicker, the progression never ends.

More skill upgrades

Let’s not forget the Perks. You’ll notice that you also have an XP bar, so after a certain amount of XP you can unlock perks. These are new abilities that will help you become even more efficient in gathering resources. As my first Perk I got the auto-cutting and watering skill, which means what you can imagine. By hovering the mouse over the tree, I didn’t have to click, instead as soon as my mouse was in the range of the tree, it activated the auto-cutting and watering skill.

Perfect little game that never ends

It’s not impossible to unlock all seasons in one afternoon session. That gives you flexibility and options. Once you have all the seasons unlocked, you can pick your favourite based on what each one has to offer.

And if you want to let the game work by itself and gather as many resources so you can batch upgrade, there is an idle mode. The cursor will then move automatically from tree to tree, together with your workers, and your trees will get cut and regrown, without you even interacting with the computer at all.

Conclusion

Trees Inc. is the perfect low-maintenance game but with a decent strategy potential. It’s perfect for busy people, who enjoy casual resource management games. Whether you have 10 minutes or four hours, this is a great game. It doesn’t require a huge time investment to be enjoyable, but even if you do invest time, you will be rewarded handsomely.

With its cute cartoon-like graphics, an easy and intuitive interface, and a soothing clicking experience, Trees Inc. can be your perfect cutting tree companion.

Played on Windows 11 and Mac OS Tahoe (Macbook Neo).