If you’ve been following our team for a while, you might be familiar with our last project, The Day We Fought Space!. It’s a fast-paced game about making spaceships slam into other spaceships with an escalating array of absurd weaponry. At a glance, you might think it’s the furthest possible thing from a cozy little game about doing sudoku so well that it makes flowers bloom.

That game had expressive plants, too, but they NEVER smiled. Not even once.

Despite the difference in town there’s an important aesthetic similarity running through the core of both games: these are both games meant to invoke and appeal to your sense of touch.

On one level, it’s literally about touch: touch input and gestures were an important part of the experience for The Day We Fought Space, and we’ve designed Primrows from day one with touch-friendly controls that you can enjoy on a touchscreen device like a Steam Deck or a Surface.

At a deeper level, it’s about the tactile experiences that our art and sound design are meant to evoke. Both games opt for a more handcrafted, painterly look meant to invoke experiences the audience might have once held in their hands. For The Day We Fought Space, we wanted players to feel like they were holding a playable comic book in their hands.

For Primrows, board games filled that role. The flower pieces are designed with shapes that look like they might have been wooden game tiles, the backgrounds would not look out of place on the background of a premium European board game, and even the quick reference card in the game rules evokes classic board game iconography.

The sound design was crafted to elevate the tactile vibes of the game and reinforce the fictional board game concept. Pruning flowers is accompanied by satisfying thunky clipping sounds, and the water animation is accompanied not only by a splash of water but by the sound of rolling dice.

While we don’t have any real-world Primrows board game pieces to play with, we do hope that all of these secondary cues will make it easy to imagine yourself moving flower-shaped tokens on a physical game board!