Tiny Garden PC Review
Summary: A cute and cozy puzzle game that meshes elements of farming and life sims with interesting results.
4
Cute!
Cozy games have really come into their own over the last few years. Titles like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing exploded in popularity, pushing the genre (if it can be called a genre by itself) into the zeitgeist.
Tiny Garden by Ao Norte is the latest entry into the cozy niche. It takes elements from both farming and life sims and melds them together into what is, at its core, a cute puzzle game.
The premise is simple. Collect seeds, grow plants, and cultivate a garden, all the while unlocking new things to grow and decorate your house with. Its title is to be taken literally, the play space is indeed tiny, with the entirety of the game taking place inside a child’s toy that is just legally distinct enough not to be a Poké Ball. When opened, the bottom half serves as the garden, with the upper area being a housing area of sorts.
You begin with a small number of seeds and a minimal area of ground to work with. After planting seeds, time is progressed by cranking a handle attached to the garden. This fast-forwards time by one day, which, in turn, advances the level of growth for each seed. With enough cranks on the handle, your plants reach maturity and can be harvested by clicking on them, and adding it to your inventory.
The contents of your inventory can then be traded for other, new seeds. This reliance on using grown items to unlock new seeds, which in turn are used to get even more new seeds is the core of Tiny Garden’s progression. Each plant has its conditions that must be met for it to sprout and grow. These conditions begin with basic requirements such as being placed on regular grass. Complexity quickly ramps up, however, with it often being necessary to use multiple different plants to achieve certain conditions for something else.
For example, early on you’re given access to potatoes, which require damp dirt to grow. For a specific square to be transformed into damp dirt, it first requires a cactus to be planted. Cacti change four of the eight tiles around them into a desert. Then placing a fountain (an early game upgrade) can change three tiles adjacent to it, into water. Combining a water tile with a desert tile creates a damp dirt tile. This manipulation of the ground is where the puzzle element of Tiny Garden comes into play.
Plants that change the tiles around them, must remain planted for the change to be persistent. Removing either the cacti or fountain would revert the affected tiles to the default within a few turns, so it’s important to consider what you need to produce in the limited space available and plan accordingly.
The gardening loop of getting seeds, figuring out how to plant new ones effectively, and then putting a plan into motion is where most of the gameplay is in Tiny Garden. It’s also what drives the secondary aspect of the game, the home decorating system. Harvested plants can be traded for a huge number of items of furniture, stickers, colours, and miscellaneous items to decorate the upper half of the toy. A subtle story runs through all of this in the background, told through letters and other collectables as the game progresses.
All of this is presented brightly and colorfully. Models are simple and not overly detailed, and textures are simple, generally being almost entirely missing in detail. It works, though. It’s a very clean and readable art style that looks great. As a result, performance is fantastic, it’s a game that should run on just about anything. As with the graphics, sound design is kept minimalistic. It’s very pleasant though, relaxing music plays throughout, and every action has satisfying aural feedback.
Steam Deck
Currently, Tiny Garden has a ‘playable’ Steam Deck rating on Steam, and this is a somewhat fair assessment. The game itself runs perfectly, never dipping below 60fps. Icons are mostly very small on screen, however, and there’s no native controller support to speak of. Thankfully the Deck’s standard mouse emulation works well enough, so as the rating suggests, it is very playable.
Final Thoughts?
Tiny Garden is a relaxing puzzle game that perfectly encapsulates the phrase ‘Easy to learn, hard to master’. A wonderful combination of farming sim, puzzle game, and light life sim. It’s very easy to lose hours planning out the perfect layout to get maximum yield on a particular crop that’s necessary to advance.
There’s a distinct lack of options in the game, be it graphical or otherwise, which is disappointing. However, it’s such a simple game both visually and from an input perspective, that it isn’t a deal breaker like it perhaps could be in other games. I did have to limit the framerate externally to stop the game from running at hundreds of fps, but other than that, no complaints.
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