Garden Story Review

I love games I can curl up with on the couch and that make me smile with little effort. Indie games are typically my first port of call for these kinds of experiences, as I can usually find some combination of my favourite genres in a pretty art style package. I’m also a huge fan of the pixel art style when it’s done well, so when I saw Garden Story with its cute plant, fruit and froggy characters in adorable pixel renders I was hopeful I had found another indie gem.

Garden Story follows Concord, a wee grape who is trying to do his best to grow plants within a region called The Grove. The Grove has been under threat from The Rot, which consumes everything in its path and breeds gloopy monsters. It is up to Concord as a newly appointed Guardian to bring all four regions of The Grove together to save it from becoming overrun and restore peaceful tranquility to this nature-filled environment.

All of the NPCs are fun and charming and the dialogue is fool of appropriate puns

Garden Story combines elements of farming sims, dungeon crawlers and action RPGs in a delightful fruit and veg coating. While you play as a humanoid grape, there is an array of NPCs that range from talking cacti to mushrooms, turnips, cherries and frogs. If you’re not instantly enchanted by the characters and the beautiful visuals then you may want to look elsewhere as this is one of Garden Story’s best features. The Grove is split into four main regions, one themed for each season with appropriately themed NPCs. The music is lovely throughout and has a range of tracks that match each beautiful area or grungy dungeon.

There is not much in the way of tutorials, which you might initially think would be a good thing, but some informative pop-ups would have been really helpful as I found myself fumbling around trying to figure out what to do and how to find resources while trying to memorise my way around The Grove. The Grove is really pretty though, which is good as you will be seeing most areas very often as fast travel isn’t unlocked until over halfway through the main story. Concord can run or roll using the right trigger which will get you around a bit faster, but this is tied to your stamina which at the beginning is limited

All of the areas are beautifully themed

The combination of limited stamina, limited tutorials and the daily quest structure means that Garden Story is slow to start, and the repetition of small quests can make the first parts of the game drag when playing for extended periods. However, after reaching the third area in particular I found the game had much more going on. Each area has three stats that gain experience as you do daily quests and net you some leafy moolah, and you can also unlock weapon upgrades. As you progress, daily quests that involve more than one area can occur which helped break some of the repetitiveness. You also have quests tied to the main story that you work through quite naturally and you can stop and work on improving a town area for a while and then continue with the main story with no drawbacks.

The array of weapons (some of which also double as tools) is very unique. While you start with a simple pick (akin to a sword like-toothpick) and hammer you eventually can fight with a parasol, dowsing rod (fishing rod), scythe and more. My personal favourite was stabbing the gloopy Rot enemies with the parasol, umbrella-based warfare is criminally underrated in gaming. The dowsing rod can also be used to gather materials from within the water or far away and the scythe is required to gather certain kinds of materials, meaning that all items serve a purpose and you’re never just using one, which I quite like. The way you use your arsenal of tools to interact with the world and solve puzzles was really engaging and every time I unlocked something new it would pull me back in or make me revisit an area to utilise it. Needing to use all of the tools does mean that you can’t just max out one and that’s that, you will need to spend time gaining resources to upgrade each, unless you want to end up hitting like a shrivelled raisin.

Delivery time!

The Rot is personified by enemies in the overworld and within buildings or domains that have become overrun (which for all intents are your run-of-the-mill dungeons). The different kinds of Rot enemies are pretty straightforward, with an array of goo-based enemies of different sizes, colours and aggroness. Sometimes goo enemies will protect themselves with hats, or sometimes acorns will spew goo – it’s basically a goo extravaganza. Each dungeon has a final boss you can beat each time you enter into the dungeon and the first boss you encounter is genuinely difficult, but these encounters become a little easier following that. Difficulty in general feels  a little uneven and lopsided, but there is an option you can toggle so you don’t die which can be handy if you’re getting frustrated and just want to go about things without worrying about your health.

As you progress through the story to clear The Grove of Rot you unlock the ability to build things and while it’s utilised a little bit within the main quest, it feels somewhat lacking outside that. Most of what you can build just adds more utility items that already exist in town, like collection bins and item depositories for quests, so all it achieves is saving a bit of backtracking. The only other category is decorations which don’t have any depth to them other than making each town look pretty. Later in the game you get access to farming plots where you can plant seeds which does add something else you can spend your day doing, allowing you to collect more materials, and it feels far more fulfilling than building. Garden Story also contains a collectathon experience within each town’s library, requiring you to search out materials to complete each collection for crafting inspiration. I will say though that I was more influenced by finishing the collection itself than by the meagre rewards for doing so.

The Rot bosses are all really interesting, unique and messy

Final Thoughts

Garden Story is the kind of chill adventure that’s great in short bursts but long play sessions may leave you bored. The combination of genres is unique, but I feel like each aspect could have been explored more for a deeper experience. I definitely enjoyed what I played and was charmed by the characters, environment and music, but at the end of it all I was left wanting more. But how much can you expect of one humble grape?

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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