Slow Grove - press kit

A living bonsai maple on your desk. Everything here may be used freely in coverage of the game. Updated 1 November 2026.

Slow Grove: a red maple in a blue pot on a wooden slab, the title beside it

Play it in the browser Download the kit (16 MB: screenshots, covers, logo, trailer)

In a sentence

Slow Grove puts a young Japanese maple on your real desk and asks for a few minutes a day: prune it, wire it and water it with your hands, and watch a season pass.

Facts

What: A mixed-reality bonsai game: one maple, tended daily, that remembers everything you did.
Platform: Meta Quest 3, Quest 3S and Quest Pro (mixed reality, hands or Touch Plus controllers); also playable in any browser with a mouse.
Where: On the web now at slow-grove.netlify.app; the Meta Horizon Store listing is being prepared.
Price: Free, with one maple. Seeds for more maples from $1.99, up to numbered mythical runs; no ads, no accounts, nothing collected.
Players: Single player; sitting or standing at a desk.
Developer: Matrix, an independent developer in Brisbane, Australia (msaart.online).
Contact: matrix@msaart.online

Trailer

A maple through the seasons, recorded from the game's own journal. 43 seconds, 1080p, H.264.

What it is

Slow Grove is a bonsai maple that lives on your real desk in mixed reality. Gold rings mark the cuts a bonsai teacher would make; pinch a branch to prune it, pinch and move to wire a bend. Water it and a season passes: spring buds, summer growth, autumn colour, winter snow on bare branches. A new day brings a new season, and the tree remembers everything you did.

Watch for visitors: a butterfly may land on your finger if you hold still, a ladybird climbs the trunk, a white-eye sings in winter. Twenty-four field notes record the moments you find. A journal replays your maple's seasons as a time-lapse, and a photo mode clears the view so you can capture the tree with the headset's camera.

The game is free, with one maple. A seed grows another maple that is yours to keep in your grove alongside the first: ten cultivars, from the common green maple to numbered mythical seeds (Ghost, Midnight and Ember) that end when their run is complete. Every seed has a certificate page of its own, and a seed can be sent as a gift with a note.

Screenshots

Captured from the game. Full-size 2560 x 1440 PNGs, the store covers and the logo are in the kit.

A Bloodgood maple in scarlet autumn colour — Bloodgood maple, autumn

A young green maple in spring with the panel and the watering can — A first maple, spring, with the panel

A Ghost maple, silver-white leaves, in summer — Ghost maple, summer

A coral bark maple in gold autumn colour — Coral bark maple, autumn

An Orange Dream maple, bare in winter with snow — Orange Dream maple, winter

Logo

Transparent PNG. The title is the only wordmark; please do not stretch it or change its colour.

Good to know

Nothing about the player is collected: no accounts, no analytics. A maple lives on the device it is grown on, and moves by a share link.
The maple is simulated, not animated: buds compete for light, vigour flows from the roots, and a cut wakes the buds near it.
Made with Meta's Immersive Web SDK as a web app, and packaged for the Horizon Store as the same site.

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