Garden Paws Review

Game: Garden Paws
Genre: Simulation RPG
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam)
Developers | Publishers: Bitten Toast Games
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: UK £18.89 | US $24.99 | EU € 20,99
Release Date: August 26th, 2021

Review code used, with many thanks to Bitten Toast Games!

Simulation gaming was my first love that brought me to playing video games. Put me on an island or abandoned town, and I’m right at home. Getting things organised, helping out the neighbours, making some money to turn my desolate shack into a nice home and getting chickens to be able to make a fried egg. Combine the game with loads of colour and cuteness and I’m sold.

This means, in real life, I’m always on the lookout for new simulation games. Now let’s go back to August 2018 when Garden Paws took to Kickstarter for funding. A big success, as the game was funded in 24 hours, which meant Bitten Toast Games could get to work on the extra tiers. Only a couple of months later, the game arrived on Steam to very positive reviews and has been getting updates and add-ons ever since.

Now, 3 years later, the game finally reaches the Nintendo Switch. Let’s see if Garden Paws works as well on our favourite handheld console.

Building Floren

You have inherited your grandparent’s farm as they set off to travel the world. Which is lovely for the grandparents. Most of the time, in farming sims, your grandparents pass away before you get to work on their farm! Builder Frank and Mayor Wilson are trying to build up the town of Floren so it may reach its full potential and of course, they need your help.

To reach your goal, money is important, it’s needed to have Frank make new structures and expand things. In Garden Paws you earn money by putting up your produce and other items in a shop at your house. So you start out with foraging everything you can find, everything from poop to flowers can be sold. Plus, as soon as you get to know the villagers, they have a lot of quests for you. So pick up every piece of wood or stone you can find!

As the game progresses and you have Frank build more structures, the game unlocks with recipes for you to craft. Pretty soon you can craft your own rod for fishing, your hoe for farming and other tools to make the most of your day.

Almost All The Boxes Ticked

To start you off, you get to choose what kind of paw prints you’re gonna make on your own turf: you have a choice of an awful lot of animals in all colours and patterns. I chose to be a dragon, as I have a distinct weakness for them. Funny too, to see him in a skirt.

Often, in a simulation game that combines many elements, there are one or two sides to the game that have been fleshed out well, with the other elements added as an afterthought. Garden Paws however tries to combine a lot:

• Foraging, with many things you can pick up and your axe and pickaxe at your side to tackle trees and bigger rocks for stone and wood. The items you can find are of a large variety, which makes it fun to look beyond the next hill to see what you can find.
• Exploring, as there is so much to see and do, even on the outskirts of your map. Not all are accessible from the first, so some discoveries are left till later.
• Farming, which is not tied to a certain area, but you can make your fields anywhere you like. You have to water your crops when it’s not raining and by adding manure, you have a chance to get not only the crop but seeds as well.

• Running a shop to earn much-needed money. You can man the counter yourself or hire someone to do that for you. The items you put up have a set price.
• Take care of your farm animals, and tame animals in the wild too. Of course, when properly cared for these animals give you produce, and you can even ride some of them.

• Crafting from blueprints starts of easy from your main menu, and then moves to a workbench for even more blueprints.
• Fishing and Cooking on the cooking station
• Mining through the mining station

• Fighting and exploring the dungeons. Whip out your wand and zap the enemies that are beamed into the dungeon by a sort of lighted column. Best take out the column itself asap! When zapping the enemies you can only move forward or sideward, making it a bit awkward at times.
• Multiplayer gameplay which I actually tested with Paula, and which worked well. You have to be friends on the Switch and if the permissions are set right, you can enjoy playing together.

There is one thing missing: socializing. You do a lot of quests for the other animals in your game, but there’s no dating or marrying. For me, that’s quite alright. It’s the part that I often left out in games like Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley. If it’s an important part for you though, know it’s not a part of the game.

A Veritable Time Sink

Does it combine all the sim elements well? It does, really, Garden Paws is a veritable time sink. I’ve been playing for days as I can’t put it down, but I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of all there is to do. That has to do with the speed of unlocking things as much as the feeling I have that there’s no way I can do all I want to in the game day.

Shopkeeping is lovely to have in the game, but it does take time. If you choose to man the counter yourself, it takes 6 in-game hours out of your day. And as the game forces you to sleep at midnight, you have only 18 hours to start with. Garden Paws solves this by having you hire a shopkeeper, but that does mean you have to pay a 20% commission on every coin you earn.

A lot of the quests you get are doled out in small dosages. Like when you find Ward, who guards the dungeon. He gives you your first wand but wants to make sure you can work it. First, you have to pop one of the big bubbles that sometimes rise out of the water and bring him the blue mystery box that’s in there. Then next day, you have to try aiming at dummies for practice. And then on day three, you can actually enter the dungeon. By the way, the dungeon can be a scary place, as I did have some trouble aiming my wand!

All of this means that there is never enough time! There are really too many things to mention. Treasure maps to collect from bottles, special festivities tied to the season (the Egg festival is on now for me), skins to collect, animals to tame, hunting for falling stars…that’s just a small example.

Some Niggles

This review wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention a couple of niggles. First, there are bugs. And not of the insect variety. The Switch version has already had its first update, and more is needed. I’ve noticed small things, like the shoulder button not doing what it should, and items on the shop table seemingly gone, only to appear again. With the experience, Bitten Toast has with the PC version and all its updates, they will fix this too. Mostly it didn’t impede my gameplay, but the fact that the quest to get a glider is broken is a pity. Hopefully, it gets fixed soon.

Another niggle for me is the size of things on the screen, especially printed text when playing handheld. I have varifocal glasses, but even then I was often buried in the game with the Switch a couple of inches from my face and the glasses on the table. Even then I had to sometimes enlarge the Switch’s screen. This is less of a problem when docking the Switch though.

One thing which isn’t exactly a niggle, but I would have loved it if you had been able to adjust the selling price for the items to sell in the shop. That would have added a lot of fun for me, but I guess we all have our preferences.

Visuals, Controls and Soundtrack

Exploration is key for Garden Paws and it’s one of the elements where the game shines. Aside from Floren, there are more islands to find. And all of that is presented in such a lovely detailed way that it often had me watch in wonder. The sun coming up in the morning, the night skies, the falling stars and lovely waterfalls and landscapes!

The game could use some tweaking in the button controls as I mentioned in the niggles, but a nice addition to the joy-con controls is that touch controls work too. The soundtrack is lovely, relaxing music in various themes to relax with while you play.

Conclusion

I had been waiting for Garden Paws on the Nintendo Switch for a long time, and it doesn’t disappoint. All the elements of a good simulation game are here, though I must mention socializing is not a part of the gameplay. The visuals look lovely, there are a ton of things to do to make this a very immersive game.

Sadly there are some bugs to repair, sometimes even hindering one of the quests. As Bitten Toast has a lot of experience with Garden Paws already on Steam, I don’t doubt this will be taken care of soon. If this is a deal-breaker for you, you might wanna wait for a while to dive in.

Looking at the fact that I think about Garden Paws even when I’m not playing, I can only recommend the game, but do beware of bugs needing to be caught.

Final Verdict: I Like It a Lot