Games Like Bamboo Cutter

There is a garden, and there is a sword.

Nothing is chasing you. Nothing is on fire. There is no timer in the corner of the screen.

There is simply a great deal of bamboo, and you have been handed the appropriate tool.

Every cut is a real cut

The blade does not play an animation at the bamboo. It carries a plane through it, and the

stalk is split along that plane. A low cut leaves a tall stump. A lazy one leaves a crooked

face you will have to look at for the rest of the round. No two cuts are the same shape.

Catch a falling half in mid-air and it splits again. Then cut one of those halves. The game

will allow this. Nobody stopped us.

The blade follows your streak

Keep cutting and the multiplier climbs. Keep it climbing and the steel changes under your

hand: iron at fifty cuts, gold at a hundred, diamond at three hundred. Harder bamboo will

not yield to a soft edge, so the metal you are holding decides what you are allowed to cut.

Break the streak and the metal goes with it, which is exactly as annoying as it sounds.

Nothing here is bought. It is held.

Techniques

The garden opens

Clear the field and the wall pulls back. No loading screen, no menu, you do not even move.

The ground behind it is wider than the one you just finished, and it is already full.

Of bamboo. It is full of bamboo.

Elsewhere

The bamboo garden is the game. But snow fell somewhere else and candy canes grew instead,

and under a humming yellow light there is a maze that quietly regrows itself every time you

empty it. Down there the bamboo has been replaced by chairs, a shelf, a potted plant and a

toilet.

They cut. We checked. The diamond-grade ones are always chairs, and we have decided not to

explain that.

Endless

Take the fence away and the world simply keeps going. One field, no target, no last stalk.

How much bamboo is that? We did not count. The world grows it faster than you can cut it,

which we verified at length, repeatedly, instead of doing other work.

The oldest surviving work of Japanese prose opens with a man walking into a grove to cut

bamboo. He found a baby inside one of the stalks and she turned out to be from the Moon.

We did not include that part. We included the bamboo.