Review of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator

I could create a garden for myself or at least purchase myself some flowers.

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator 
Platform: PC
Developer: Stillalive Studios
Publisher: Nacon
Release date: February 22nd, 2024
Price: $24.99
Availability: Steam

Considering the abundance of games with an agricultural theme available, it’s likely that you’re an experienced digital gardener already. Farming has been made easier for players with games like Immortal Life, Rune Factory, and Story of Seasons. All of the titles have encouraged us to establish a daily routine, from tilling the soil and giving your fields regular irrigation to preventing those annoying weeds from taking over.

And Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator by Stillalive Studios primarily reflects that. In contrast to its peers, this community doesn’t prioritize finding a life partner or producing an abundance of food. Rather, the focus of the game is on maintaining a lavish European garden that is stocked with more than 240 different decorative items and a variety of wildflowers. If that’s your thing, there are lots of gnomes you can put in your green area.

How Is the Growth in Your Garden?

Garden Life aspires for grandeur, whereas genre entries go for a cartoonish appearance. Roses don’t grow in uniform 2D rows as a result. Rather, they bloom in shrubs that resemble natural ones, daffodils grow to a moderate height, and climbing plants like ivy cling to trellis in a believable way. Because each plant is procedurally created, your garden will appear charmingly natural. Comparably, the town plaza in the city, where you go to buy supplies and tools, is extremely detailed and captures the extravagance of a Victorian village.

But there’s a price for this visual indulgence. There is a limit to how many plants you can have in a garden according to Garden Life. That lush paradise you’re undoubtedly picturing is therefore still out of reach. Once the graphical settings are reduced, Garden Life runs flawlessly on hardware such as the Steam Deck thanks to Unreal Engine 5’s scalability. You will notice, though, that the game’s world isn’t one large area. You’ll see loading screens each time you visit the town or return home for the night.

The absence of physics modeling in Garden Life may annoy certain people. Rocks can be picked up, rotated, and replaced just like any other in-game object. However, if you grasp one, all stones that are resting on top of it will float. Clearly, Stillalive had to give up some things, and the simulation is less realistic without gravity. The developer appears to have included cosmetic seasonal periods or flowering flowers in a single calendar day for player convenience, at the very least.

Flowers Among the Weeds

Of course, Garden Life has its share of entertaining moments if you can look past these flaws. You have two options for playing the game: Story Mode or Creative Mode, which gives you complete control over all the implements, plants, and ornaments to create your own miniature version of the Gardens of Versailles. The game’s story will probably be adequate if you’re looking for a little bit more structure. Yes, it’s a little ridiculous that you get quests from the spirit of the last person who looked after your garden.

There is a certain allure, though, to finding your way to an accessible greenhouse that has automatic sprinklers. Additional tasks include addressing pests, acquiring derivative seeds for new plant hues, and completing bouquet orders. For better or worse, there isn’t much thought put into it other than coming up with a simple fix for every issue. That might be a basic component of any “cozy” game.

In summary

Even while I had a lot of fun tending to my virtual garden, the game’s Western European style annoyed me a little. Currently, DLC provides recycled decorations like tires that have a second life as planters and fairy lights produced from plastic bottles. You may have to search elsewhere for your botanical delights, though, if you’re hoping to recreate the horticultural charms of Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay or the Hanami of Shinjuku Gyoen or Ueno Park..

Review Overview

Gameplay – 65%

Controls – 60%

Aesthetics – 80%

Content – 70%

Accessibility – 70%

Value – 65%

68%

OK

Summary : In Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator, you can create your own botanical paradise while unwinding. But you’ll definitely have to give up on some of your goals when faced with constraints as rigid as your typical HOA agreement.