Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator Review

Review based on patch 1.8.0.0

It is refreshing to get a gardening simulator that isn't about growing and selling vegetable crops. Instead the player cultivates a community garden full of decorative plants and lawn ornaments. The locals will provide a few seeds and tools to get the player started, but to earn money you will need to create flower bouquets from clipped flowers to sell in the marketplace via an honor system display. There are four seasons, but these are mostly cosmetic and only impact the availability of certain items in the shop.

Each species of plant is available for purchase in the marketplace right away, but only as the 'base' variety. Special color variants are obtained randomly from seeds produced by mature plants in the garden. There is also an assortment of gnomes, trellises, planters, wind chimes, benches, and ponds to decorate the yard with. These can be rotated, stacked, and clipped into other objects. However, there is a limit to the number of plants and decorations you can have. After planting the greenhouse I had reached about 80% of the plant cap, so I needed to lean heavily on decor to fill out the remaining bare patches of the yard. It was disheartening, but I can accept that this is likley due to hardware limitations. And it isn't like these plants are static; when clipped the leaves grow back, they climb rocks and buildings, and they grow or wither in front of your eyes.

It would've been nice to have had animals like hummingbirds or butterflies show up when certain plants are grown. Instead the most you get is fish by placing a statue near a stream. There are so many improvements and additional decorative plants or elements such as xeriscaping that could be added in the future or in a sequel. I would be excited for anything new from this humble little game.

NPCs only appear as 2D images next to a dialogue box, but are all excellently designed and very likable. What little story is present was surprisingly touching.

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