This branching game about being a tree has 16 endings

It turns out being a tree is more exciting than just standing on the spot listening to the wind rustling your leaves—at least if How To Be a Tree's arboreal fantasy is to be believed. As a tree, you can become a therapist, sprout a jetpack and blast into space, or conquer humanity, jumping over tanks and toppling skyscrapers.

It's a platformer with a branching story that will take you to one of 16 surreal endings. It has a touch of The Stanley Parable about it: you can take several paths through the levels, and as you do so the narration will change, a floating eye following you around and passing judgement.

As for the platforming, your tree is surprisingly bouncy and bendy, and you can curl it up into a compact squiggle to squeeze through tight gaps. The trailer at the bottom of this post will give you a good idea.

It's a short game: creator Jimmy "Zaphos" Andrews posted a 46-second speedrun on YouTube this week. Most playthroughs will take a lot longer, but you could probably find all the endings in two to three hours.

Grab it for free on itch.io. And if you're a tree lover, you should read Matt's history of trees in PC gaming.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.