If you’re looking for a new cozy game to play, this one has to be on your list. Tiny Garden is a miniature garden simulation game, where you grow a garden inside of a nostalgic toy like object.
The premise of the game is on the simple side – you grow different plants, vegetables and fruits, and then use the harvests to purchase seeds for new things to grow, or for a variety of different decorations.
Your tiny garden is split into two different sections: the base and the top shelving section. The base is where the growing magic happens, holding your garden. The planting itself follows a typical farming sim type of process. You plant each seed, and each seed will take a certain number of turns to grow. The turns work via the crank attached to your garden, and, unlike other farming sims, you’re able to turn that crank as often and as much as you like with no limitations. This was something I particularly liked about this game – there was no awkward waiting periods, you’re able to grow at your leisure, and because of the way it’s structured, you can actually get a lot more strategic with your planting. Once a plant is fully grown you can harvest it which will place that particular plant in your inventory, and allow you to use it to buy other plants, or decorations for your garden.
Now there’s a lot more to the planting then just picking a seed and popping it in the ground. Each plant has planting requirements – mostly relating to what soil it can be placed in. Your most basic plants can be placed in the standard dirt tiles you start with, but as you progress you’ll need grassy tiles, water tiles, mud tiles, soil tiles and more. How do you get these different soil types? Well you create them by planting particular plants. Planting things that grow in an arid climate will transform the tiles surrounding it into desert tiles – which by the way you can’t plant a lot in – certain bushes when planting will create grassy tiles, and you’ll need to unlock tools like fountains or garden gnomes to create some of the other tiles like water tiles, or leaf tiles.
Things get interesting when you begin to need to combine different tiles to create a third tile type – so for example your rich soil type can only be created by ensuring you place an arid tile with a water tile. This means you’re often completely rejigging your garden to optimize for what you’re trying to grow, and definitely keeps the gameplay fresh. If the soil your plant is growing in changes, you’ve got two crank turns to get it back to the desired type, otherwise you’ll lose the plant – so placement is very important in this game.
There are multiple different categories of plants to unlock, each requiring a particular harvest to open up, and usually requiring you to complete a decent amount of the previous tier to be able to access. Each category has different plants, with different growing requirements, and there’s a bit of back and forth in a lot of the gameplay as you often need to unlock the next tier before you can fully finish off the previous one.
The main growing gameplay is very addictive, and definitely has that ‘just one more’ quality, that is mostly driven by discovery. You see, you don’t actually know what you’re growing until you successfully grow the plant, you’re only given a silhouetted picture and some basic details. Once you grow the plant, you get all of the information on it, but it is this drive to unlock everything that really pushes the gameplay and creates an addictive gameplay loop. Often the silhouettes are deceiving, so you’ll think that you’re obviously growing a watermelon, but it’s actually a tomato, sprinkling in a bit of humorous gaslighting from the developers, that just adds to the mystery.
The top shelving section of the game is where you get to show off some of your personality by decorating to your hearts content. You’ll progressively unlock three shelves for you to place various furniture and decoration items on, and there’s a ton of different items you can choose from. Each item has a certain resource cost, which you’ll need to harvest some plants for, and you can customise each items colour by unlocking different colour palettes to use. Alongside the different decorations, you can also unlock stickers to decorate the outside of your garden toy with, and I was pleasantly surprised to find some familiar characters from other indie games in sticker form! You can choose from some adorable veggie stickers, as well as some of your favourite game characters like Duck Detective or Terry Turbot – how cool?
At first glance, you’d think this is a game that is light on story, and that is true to a degree. There isn’t an obvious, hand-holding, type of story in this game, but instead we’re treated to a passive story told via letters that you find when going about your different tasks. Placing different furniture items will sometimes reward you with a letter, giving you a bit of insight into the Tiny Garden world. Some letters will just be world building, filled with some lovingly written discourse from a friend, others will hold the key to unlocking something special, but only if you can get the pictured plant formation correct.
A big theme in this game is collecting – you can collect all the different plants, the different furniture, the different colour palettes, the different stickers, and the different letters – so if you’re someone who like achievement hunting, this game will hold a lot of different content in there for you to unlock. The gameplay is essentially endless, you can play for an hour or for ten, as the gameplay is so open-ended that there really is no limits to what you can build within the bounds of your toy.
The design of Tiny Garden is suitably adorable, using a vibrant colour palette and some cute illustrations throughout the game. The different colour palettes you unlock not only allow for different customisation options, but they also change the whole vibe of the game, and somehow they all still seamlessly work together to give us a beautiful game. The sound design offers unobtrusive gameplay, with a cozy soundtrack and suitable sound effects that are really useful in telling you when things are ready to harvest. Together the entire aesthetic of the game is cozy, colourful, and fun – the perfect match for the game’s content.
Overall, Tiny Garden is a highly addictive game that feels like the lovechild of Polly Pocket and Farmville. The lack of time related constraints, combined with the drive to unlock everything really create a game that is highly engaging, and very easy to lose time playing. The gameplay itself feels rewarding and balanced, and definitely has moments that feel strikingly similar to a crafting game. This is a game that can be enjoyed by any gamer of any age, and is one that is well worth picking up.
Tiny Garden is available now on Steam, a big thanks to Dead Good PR for the review key!
Until next time, stay caffeinated!
