Garden Simulator Review

[Claudio Davey]

Tasksare sent to the mailbox at the house, which provides some focus for gameplay, but these can be quite mundane and aren't particularly challenging to achieve. They reward you with experience points and garden coins. Levelling up gives a skill point, which can be spent to improve certain aspects of gardening life; improving watering efficiency, increased funds from harvesting, etc.

It's really fun to plan out and design your garden; veggies go in this spot, flowers would look nice over there. You can plant in the ground, raised beds, and pots. Everything feels quite realistic, but the controls seem to have a really hard time letting you put things down with any precision, which can really ruin a whole vision.

Jade has grown up on PlayStation, and spent far longer finding those pigeons, completing those jumps, and chasing those Trophies than she cares to admit. She's never happier than when she's in Junes, Hope's Peak, or collecting Wumpa Fruit.

I guess for me, it would make more sense to just get up and go outside and grow some plants in potting soil.

I usually like to do things in games that I can not do in real life.

But if others enjoy something like this... then I say more power to them. You do you....

I don't expect anyone on this site to care about a gardening game. What I would recommend, especially in today's times, is to start your own REAL garden. Grow your own food. It will help supplement you and your family if food supplies run short in stores like we saw during Covid with supply chain issues.

I would love it if someone made a game like this but it was a total bait n switch, where for the first 30 or 40 minutes one is actually playing a gardening simulator and droning along doing meditative things, with a radio playing softly in the background. But then the radio becomes more insistent and you start to hear things about an 'outbreak' and then these creatures start shambling toward your house and it becomes an FPS/survival horror story.

Im glad they didnt introduce 'pests'. They would be the equivalent of the disasters in sim city, which I hated.

Not introducing weather conditions seems like a miss, but I can live with that!

Ive just switched to ps app and bought it, downloading now.

I need to stop screaming at NFS unbound as another car appears from inky blackness in the last seconds of a race to take me out and frustrate me. Maybe this will be the calm I need ?

Thanks for the review Jade, appreciated.

As for the game its exactly what I expected for my 15. Boring, yes. Repetitive, yes. But strangely compelling and calming. I'm happy, and my wife gave an excited squeal when I showed her the game! Don't hear too many of them these days ?

I wasted an entire week of holiday game time playing this Lawnmower STIMulator. The gameplay loop is insanely addictive for those that crave dopamine. Every straight line or perfectly rounded tree swirl gave a hit of it. It's the main reason I did not get the powerwash one.

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator readily identifies itself in the title. Encouraging players to engage with its structure at a relaxed pace, growing an ideal garden is the goal in either mode and limited friction makes for a solid time.

Powerwash Simulator had a dazzlingly simple goal. Eradicate the grime and dirt from virtually every virtual surface the game tasked you to do. Similar myopic objectives bleed into the varying Farming, Truck, Flight, and other simulators that hope to tantalize the specific group of players wishing to replicate a specific task in video game form.

I'm not much of a gamer, but I always have an eye out for chill city-builders, and bonus points if they have a solarpunk vibe. My current favorite game is Terra Nil, a reverse city-builder that came out earlier this year. In it, you restore ecosystems, turning wastelands into beautiful forests, tundras, and tropical paradises. Then, when you're all done cleaning up all the toxins and radioactive waste, re-planting and re-introducing flora and fauna, you build yourself a spaceship and leave the planet, happy in the knowledge that you fixed something that humans destroyed.

But the other day I downloaded the 2021 game Cloud Gardens, which the dev describes as "partly a gardening simulator, partly a dystopian landscape builder, and partly a puzzle game." The game presents you with a series of floating islands of apocalyptic liminal spaces: broken-up highways, scarred parking lots, rusted train tracks, abandoned greenhouses. Then you grow plants to cover up the grimy ruins.

After planting seeds, you get them to grow by placing trash, rusted-out cars, and other bits of society's detritus on the landscape, giving the plants new surfaces to grow on. Your goal is to cover the entire scene with plants. It's an extremely chill game with only a light layer of strategy involved in deciding where the plants will grow the best and where to place the objects so they don't crush the foliage.

While filling up a particular landscape with the provided objects--one of those playground spinny things and children's toys--I realized that I was constructing a sort of post-apocalyptic version of a liminal space image, many of which feature empty playgrounds.

It's a bit strange that a game set in an abandoned, fog-swathed world with an unsettling number of highway underpasses could feel comforting, but it really does, in much the same way that "liminal space" images do.

I dunno, maybe there's just something about growing wisteria on a porta potty using a cursor shaped like a worn glove. In contrast to Terra Nil, this game is a bit simpler--you aren't reconstructing an ecosystem, leeching the toxins from the land, and making a hospitable place for animals. You're just reintroducing nature in the form of green growing things like vines, moss, monstera, mushrooms, and cacti. And the only animals seem to be the crows that swoop around you as you garden. (Though I haven't finished the game yet, so I couldn't say definitively.)

Garden Life succeeds in giving justice to its title of being a cozy simulator. Its sincere story premise, captivating visual art style, repetitive but addicting gameplay loop, and relaxing ambience from its music and sound effects all combine to serve up a calming experience of garden caretaking. Tending to plants and decorating the garden with various knick-knacks have never been more cozy.

Moving on from the narrative, the gameplay itself was surprisingly addictive. Perhaps it has something to do with how simple and repetitive it is, and how my own brain enjoys doing repetitive tasks and finds comfort in the familiar and muscle memory. The overall gameplay loop of mere planting, watering, fertilizing, pruning, and selling tickles my brain in a good way, providing my own version of cozy.

The art direction in this game is so pretty, enough said. The rich flora and handful of friendly critters scattered around are such a feast for the eyes that make the repetitive gameplay much more pleasant and enjoyable, which all adds to the gentleness of the atmosphere. Not just the in-game models, but all the illustrations are top-notch as well.

Garden Life is truly a cozy simulator in all of its facets, and anyone who could get the game will have their hands full with tons of stacks of leaves for the compost bin. I genuinely feel I like I want to play more of the game after spending time away from it, and that attests to the addictive soothing nature of Garden Life.

Robin, the previous caretaker of the community garden, has unfortunately passed away, leaving the garden unattended. The community has been looking for someone else to take their place, and so you arrive to try and fill their shoes. You must uphold the beauty and structure of the fauna Robin has constructed, as their ghost continues to roam and wishes for you to continue the list of tasks they had left behind.

In the starting season of spring in Garden Life, strive to get the Flower Stall built as soon as possible to be able to sell flower cuttings. While progressing to getting the stall built, have plenty of Yellow Daffodils planted, fertilized, and harvested every hour to build up a stash. Yellow Daffodils are one of the earlier and easiest plants you will have access to, and they sell well during the initial season.

Each shower suite features a walk-in shower and a sink. For whatever reason, there are no toilets in the shower suites, unlike in the other Al Mourjan Lounge. On the plus side, the air circulation in the shower suites seems to be better than in the other lounge.

There are also a few private family rooms, which are a nice touch. This basically lets you grab a private living room, which is ideal if you have little kids. Each room has a couch, a few chairs, and a TV.

@Ben. Not apropos this post, but I would love to be able to browse a gallery of the pictures (with captions) from these review posts that feature dozens of pictures. Do you think that might be something you might be able to implement, if there's interest from other readers? (Though Boarding Area's infrastructure would probably not allow for it?)

I'm still baffled as to this Louis Vuitton lounge. It's a lounge within a lounge, where even though you don't pay for anything in the Al Mourjan lounge, you then pay for everything in the LV lounge, because it has an LV logo on it? What is the point? Is it just for influencers?

@ Chris W -- Correct, it's not open to the public. Not only that, but you actually need Privilege Club Gold or Platinum status in addition to having access to the lounge to visit the Louis Vuitton Lounge. Only time will tell if this concept proves successful.

@ Jeffrey -- Yep, as noted by Origami, they can't be locked, so you can leave your stuff in lockers if you want. Personally I'd feel pretty comfortable leaving my items in a nap room, though, given that the area is staffed, so there aren't just dozens of people walking past all the nap rooms.

Ben - in the entry requirements section you link to your past article on Qatar's business lite fare ( -airways-basic-business-class/). That older article notes business lite as being the "R" fare class, but I believe that may be a typo (or it changed) as it's the "P" fare class that is business lite and doesn't include lounge access. Just noting as it caused some initial confusion for an upcoming Qatar business flight I'm on before realizing...

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