Game: Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator
Genre: Simulation
System: Steam (Windows) (also available for Nintendo Switch, PS4 & PS5 & Xbox)
Developer|Publisher: stillalive studios | Nacon
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $24.99 | UK £20.99 | EU € 24,99
Age Rating: UK 3+ | US E
Release Date: February 22nd, 2024
Review code provided with many thanks to Dead Good Media.
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is a cozy simulator where you take care of a community garden, buy seeds, and sell flowers. As you build up the garden, you can expand into more and more of the grounds to make an even better garden.
The Gameplay of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator plays a lot like most simulation games. You have an open plot of land, and you get to choose where and how to plant the seeds you end up with. As you plant them and they grow up, you can earn mutated seeds that will give you new variants of the same kind of flowers, usually a different color of petals. If you can’t purchase this color and plant combination in the seed store, you’ll need to attempt to breed it yourself.
Every day, you need to weed the whole garden, pull up dead plants, clear out rocks, water all your plants, and spray for insects. You can make each of these chores easier as you upgrade all your tools by installing things like sprinklers and bug hotels. These can be built sometimes, but many of them are for purchase at the seed store in town.
Plants basically grow overnight, and you can trim blossoms off, allowing them to grow even more blooms. Then, you can use the cuttings to make flower baskets, send them off to customers, or sell them in your stand in town. The whole atmosphere of the game is really cozy, slow, and chill. You have stuff to do, but nothing has a deadline. You can spend all day just laying out your rose bushes just right if you want without worrying about missing anything. While I wouldn’t recommend it since you need to do things in the game to unlock items, you don’t have to engage with the goals at all if you don’t really want to.
The Look and Feel of Playing Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is gorgeous. You can tell that the developers put a lot of time and effort into making everything beautiful and cozy and allowing you to relax as you play. Each plant grows into unique-looking, mostly realistic flowering plants, and you can decorate the whole garden with birdbaths, ponds, benches, and other decorations. These items can be crafted or purchased in town.
Overall, this game has a great vibe; the music is chill, the sound design is wonderful, the graphics are so pretty, and everything just feels really comfy. There isn’t a grid keeping you from planting wherever you want, like there is in games like Animal Crossing, and there are TONS of plants to choose from. You need to plant a little bit of everything to make sure you get enough of what ever flowers the person who is trying to order flowers from you needs, but you are mostly left to your own devices.
You can ride into town whenever you would like and work towards fulfilling quests, sell flowers, or buy items from the store. You unlock new buildings as you go, opening more and more stuff up to buy and interact within town. The town is really chill and cozy, too, lending to the vibe that no one cares about the passage of time in this place. But it’s not all roses in the land of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator.
The Cons of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator
I have to say I had a lot of trouble writing this review. There is so much about the game that just doesn’t sit right with me, but I had a lot of trouble nailing down exactly what I didn’t like about it. For a game that is all about planting, building, and fixing, the inventory system isn’t great.
Each type of thing goes in its own kind of inventory, which makes finding what you’re looking for really annoying at first. You have very limited space in your inventory, and there is no sorting function, no way to easily see on the screen what kinds of flowers you need or should be collecting. This isn’t a big deal until you have 100 different kinds of seeds and flowers and have no way to look through them efficiently.
You only see the main story missions in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and not the side quests that get mailed to you. I resorted to writing things I needed to collect and bring back to town to fulfil the pavilion statues requests, which felt a little like something the game should have been keeping track of for me. Menuing got to be excessively frustrating when I was trying to make sure I had all the flowers I needed to bring into town or to the mailbox to finish up requests.
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator also did one of the things I dislike the most in games like this: not taking note of your progress outside of quests. So, I had a lot of problems with my copy of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator, deleting my progress and saves and freezing, and things like that. Every time I would lose progress, I would head back to remake that Squirrel Bench. I needed to check off the first thing on my list, and I would put it down, but the quest hadn’t completely started yet, so I would have a list like:
- Go to the crafting bench (1/1)
- Make a Squirrel Bench (0/1)
- Place the Squirrel Bench in the garden somewhere (1/1)
So I would have to make another bench and waste my rocks (which didn’t respawn very fast) just to finish that quest chain.
It wasn’t game-ruining, but it was just kind of annoying. I had to start over twice because of issues with saves and things, which means I never got very far into Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator‘s story. This might be one of those things I have to come back and revisit this article again after I get a chance to power through the rest of the story, but I’m not sure I will have the patience, considering all the issues I have had.
Not to mention that there are two sounds when moving objects from inventory to the seed library and back that are exceptionally loud and annoying for no reason, as well as the game needing to play the pickup noise (also kind of annoying) with every little item you pick up and send to storage. Here is a video of the peaceful noise of the game, me looking at my flowers and the sunset, then it is ruined by this weird noise when I get when I trim flowers:
I praised the sound design, which is mostly very good, minus these couple of things that make me want to play with the sound off. So, I’m not sure I want to get much further in Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator than I already have.
This might sound like a weird complaint, but I have never played a first-person simulation game where I couldn’t jump before! I weirdly really missed it, even though I get why it wasn’t included in Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator.
Conclusion
I have a lot of mixed feelings here. As I said before, I like the vibe. Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator has a lot of great things going for it, like the music, the look, the movement, most of the sound design, and the freedom the game gives you. But there are a lot of downsides keeping me from making up my mind. The items are cute, but if you try to do too much at once, your game freezes. I adore the aesthetic, but I really hated the inventory system.
After a lengthy debate with myself, I think I like Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator. But I just can’t make myself recommend it to anyone. It feels finished, but the polish that games like this need to be fun is missing. I don’t think I can make a 100% sure statement on whether or not you should pick this up. If you really love the idea of gardening in a sim and you don’t mind the weird noises and the terrible sorting and menuing, then I could see wanting to spend $25 USD on this title.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure.
