GROW RPG: The Order Puzzle That Grew a Dungeon

GROW RPG is the entry where On Nakayama took his one mechanic and dressed it as a role-playing game. There is a hero, a shop, a dungeon and a flying devil to kill, and underneath all of it you are still doing the only thing a GROW game ever asks: deciding what to place next.

That question — how much can you bolt onto an order puzzle before the puzzle stops being the point — is one we had to answer ourselves. Island Evolution also uses eight items and 40,320 orders, and we deliberately kept everything else out: no shop, no combat, no currency. Why GROW RPG went the other way, and what it gained and lost by it, is worth a look before you decide which kind you want.

What is GROW RPG?

Nakayama published it at eyezmaze.com in July 2005, dated July 23 by Jay Is Games, two months before GROW Cube. You get eight items and a small green sphere of a world, and you drag the items onto it one at a time. After each placement everything already there tries to advance a level, so the sphere gets a tower, a forest, a village and a hero who grows up alongside the scenery.

An Android and iOS version followed in April 2015, which is why this one is still easy to find while other Flash games of its vintage are gone.

What did the RPG layer actually add?

Three things that no other GROW game had: combat against an enemy, a shop where the hero buys health and weapons, and a dungeon with treasure in it. Jay Is Games described it as the classic formula with RPG-like elements attached, and that is the right way round. The combat works as a readout. How well the fight goes depends on how far the relevant items got, which depends on the order you chose several clicks earlier.

So the RPG layer is really a score with a story attached. Instead of a number telling you which level the tower reached, you watch a knight walk into a fight carrying whatever your sequence earned him. Players remember the purple devil, and what the devil is measuring is your planning.

Why is a dragon fight still an order puzzle?

Because nothing in the fight responds to skill. You do not aim, dodge or time anything, and there is no difficulty setting. Every variable was fixed before the fight started, by the sequence, which means the fight is a presentation of a decision you already made.

This is worth noticing if you are the kind of player who bounces off puzzle games. GROW RPG looks like an action game in screenshots and plays like a spreadsheet with a paint job. That combination is the series' one trick, and it is why a 2008 IGDA paper credited the GROW games with defining a genre of their own.

What do people mean when they search for a growth RPG?

Usually one of three things. Some want GROW RPG itself and are half-remembering the title. Some want an RPG where the world grows rather than the character, which is a smaller category than you would expect. The rest want idle and incremental games, where numbers go up while you are not looking.

The three overlap in mood and differ completely in what they ask of you. Ours is squarely the first kind — one decision per item, no numbers ticking up while you wait. If you came looking for the third kind and landed on the first, the difference below is the one that matters.

How is an order puzzle different from an idle game?

An idle game spends your time. You make a choice, the numbers climb while you wait, and waiting longer is always an option. An order puzzle spends your turns, and there are only ever as many turns as there are items. Nothing accumulates while you think, and no amount of patience buys a level.

That changes what a failed run means. In an idle game a bad build is slow, and in an order puzzle a bad order is finished: the item that needed five levels from the eighth slot is not going to catch up, because there are no turns left to catch up in. The whole skill is front-loaded into a decision you make with incomplete information, then repeated with better information, which is closer to a logic puzzle than to a grind.

How do you plan an order when the items feed each other?

Start by finding the item that needs nothing. In every game in this family there is one near the bottom of the dependency tree whose own growth is unconditional, while other items are waiting on it. It earns an early slot because everything downstream of it stays frozen until it moves, which has nothing to do with how important it looks.

After that, count levels. Long chains need long runways, cheap items can take whatever slot is left, and any item that harms its neighbours should go as late as you can afford. The full procedure, including how to read a failed run as a labelled data point, is in how to play order puzzles without guessing. Our own game hands you the dependency tree directly in the evolution chart, which removes the guesswork and leaves the scheduling problem, which is the interesting half.

Where can you play something like GROW RPG now?

The original still exists in its HTML5 and mobile forms, since Nakayama ported much of the catalogue before Flash reached end of life on December 31, 2020. What does not exist is a sequel. Nothing new has appeared in the series since 2018, and there have been no updates since 2020.

Island Evolution is the same mechanic pointed at a deserted island instead of a hero: no combat, no shop, and a requirement chart you can actually read. For the full family tree of the original series, see what GROW games are, and for the entry that came two years after this one, GROW Island explained.

Where do these facts come from?

• The GROW (series) entry on Wikipedia, for release dates, the mobile ports and the 2008 IGDA paper.
• Jay Is Games' 2005 review of GROW RPG, for the release date, the eight items, the shop, the dungeon and the enemy.

Island Evolution is an independent game with no affiliation to Eyezmaze or On Nakayama. GROW RPG is their work.