Does this game wilt or bloom?
Garden Life is a relaxing gardening game in which you create your dream garden in a peaceful, colourful world. Plant and add ornaments at your own pace, transforming an overgrown forgotten plot into a flourishing community garden.
To say Garden Life is relaxing is an understatement. There’s never any time constraints for requests and you can play the entire game at your own pace. You begin with a small area to plant your flowers before eventually building a stall in the town to sell them. Areas do get unlocked as you progress and you always feel like you’re pushing forward, no matter how slow you are going.
You can also decorate your garden with ornaments like gnomes, frogs and the like. You can spend ages just cutting flowers, planting seeds and watering them or setting up sprinklers to do it for you. Requests vary from gathering a few flowers for a contract to collecting a bunch of different ones for displays in the main town. There’s also a deep narrative that I wasn’t expecting to find as you are guided by a ghost of the previous owner of the community garden.
The visuals are impressive with an almost watercolour edge to them. It runs at a solid framerate and load times between areas are within a second or two. The music is calming and the voice-acting is decent overall. In terms of glitches, I’ve only come across the game crashing once or twice. Other than that, it’s been pretty smooth sailing.
The Verdict
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is exactly what it sounds like. It doesn’t put any pressure on you to complete tasks so you are free to do them as you see fit. It’s calming, relaxing and addictive with a neat art style and a decent story to go along with it. Overall, I’d say it’s grown on me (groan…sorry!)