Game: Garden Witch Life
Genre: RPG, Simulation, Adventure
System: Nintendo Switch (Also available on Steam (Windows), Xbox X/S and PS5)
Developer | Publisher: Freetime Studio | SOEDESCO
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: US $29.99 | UK £26.99 | EU € 29,99
Release Date: September 12th, 2024
Review code used, with many thanks to SOEDESCO.
In Garden Witch Life, you play as a recently made redundant alchemist who, through a chance drink and cupcake, has their life turned round through the kindness of a stranger. Create a new home, make new friends, and discover the mysteries surrounding Moonflower Island.
I’ve been looking forward to playing Garden Witch Life since I saw it on the Wholesome Snack back in late 2021. Three years and a slight name change later, it’s now released. Will its charms cast a spell on me? Or will it be jinxed?
A New Life for a Garden Witch
Once you’ve created your character, Garden Witch Life launches into an interactive cut scene, explaining why you are on an airship heading towards Moonflower Island. You’ve been made redundant, and the only option is to return to your parental home. However, before your home world, there is a short stopover at Moonflower Island. Disembarking, you are encouraged to find your way around town, and as you leave the port, another interactive cut scene happens.
May, the owner of Succulent Sweets, offers you a drink and cupcake, and before long you tell her all your woes. This generous soul gives you a comfy couch to sleep on for that night, and the next morning, you help her make a cake. It’s a great way to learn some of the controls and gain a tasty treat.
May then has a brilliant idea and takes you across town. Here, she presents you with your new home, a massive tree house surrounded by a broken fence and fields full of crystal wheat.
Early Days in Garden Witch Life
I always like some guidance in a game, especially at the start, and Garden Witch Life doesn’t disappoint. As soon as May leaves, you are instructed to check your mail. This then leads to more instructions: learn the recipe, plant a tomato, plant a potato, and visit Tin.
Generally, recipes are automatically learnt, but for this one, you need to select it via the inventory menu. Once learnt, you are encouraged to enter the house, dice a potato, and make potato soup. All of this gives you experience with the chopping board and cooking mini-games.
Tin will give you a pickaxe, axe and shovel. With these, you can start clearing the land around the house and plant the tomato and potato seeds May sent you. Down in the town, you will meet other residents. Aurel, the general storekeeper, will give you a ‘meet the residents’ quest and through talking with Lyra, the librarian, and Luam, the spa technician, you learn that the river in town is polluted.
And just when you think things can’t get better in Garden Witch Life, a ghost turns up at your door and tells you the crystal wheat growing all around your house is poisoning the land. They explain that you can turn it into compost and spread it over the ground to help restore the nutrients.
The first few days are exciting and busy. There is so much going on: tending to the crops, places to explore, people to find and meet, and the crystal wheat to clear.
Who can I be in Garden Witch Life
One of the areas in which Garden Witch Life excels is customisation. There is a lot of choice. The colour of skin, blush, eyebrows, 3 areas of the eye, makeup, and 3 areas of the hair can all be configured using a hue, saturation, and value sliding scale. There are various beards, makeup and hairstyles, although eyebrow and eyelash styles are limited to one or two choices. It’s possible to select a name and pronoun for your little garden witch.
Although you create your character at the start of Garden Witch Life, there is a mirror in the tree house and spa where you can update your selection.
Gardening
There is no grid structure in Garden Witch Life for either planting or placing objects. This allows for a more life-like garden, but it can be irritating if you like straight lines! When planting seeds, circles appear, indicating how large the plant is and whether plants nearby will thrive (purple) or suffer (red) with the new addition. Items and plants will go red if they can’t be placed.
The garden ghost will give a magic lens, which allows plants to be inspected. Inspecting plants will give you all the information you need about the plant: which seasons the plant grows in, how long it takes to reach maturity, the different stages of growth, and various slide bars for health, water, nutrients and plant interactions. This is the only way to discover this information, but you have to memorise it, as it doesn’t appear in the journal.
Plants can be harvested at different stages through their growth. The sage, for example, can be harvested as leaves, and the plant will continue to grow. However, you could wait until you get a flower or seeds, at which point the plant will be picked, and a new one will be needed. Lavender is the other way round: picking leaves will harvest the whole plant, but flowers will enable the plant to carry on growing. Again, good luck in remembering what does what, as it isn’t noted anywhere!
Life as a Garden Witch
Whenever new items are made or plants harvested, any recipe associated with them will appear. It’s worth making the new items as soon as possible, as quite often, the new recipe or item will produce more recipes. For example, roses unlock rose water, which in turn unlocks rose perfume, and crates unlock apiaries.
Using the pickaxe, axe, or sickle will drain your character’s energy, although it does replenish automatically during the day. Colliding with thorns will cost 5 health points, and although these replenish automatically, it’s very, very slow. Food can help restore both but with limited success. However, it’s the fatigue gauge that needs to be watched, as it ticks along 1 point every 12 in-game seconds. So, in the early game, it’s early to bed, or else you fall asleep. There is no financial penalty if you do, but you start the next day very tired (half the gauge is already full). This also means you never see the night in Garden Witch Life.
Improving your friendship with the residents will give you access to different shop items, quests and cut scenes. Generally, most gifted items will give 10 points, but there are favourites, and there is a great guide on Steam listing them. Gemmi is a particularly hard character to please!
The Bugs in Garden Witch Life
Unfortunately, in the review version (1.0.16), there are just too many issues in Garden Witch Life to make it an enjoyable experience. There are issues that don’t break the game as such, like a lack of ground (see photo) on the path leading to the mine, the camera acting weirdly at the bottom of the mine, the frame rate dropping at the fairy portal, navigating around the map is difficult, and some of the special text is repeated at odd times.
Then there are issues which mean you can get stuck in the spa and have to collapse to escape, meaning less time the next day; if you place an item on another when using the split option, it causes a software error crash; you can lose items when gifting; there are no tooltips or descriptions, so you need to remember all the different icons; and there is only one exact spot to open the second mine gate.
During one playthrough, the Magic Manoir didn’t open, even in full friendship with Rud. In another playthrough, Lyra locked me out of the library, even though I needed to tell her about clearing the pollution, and the game froze just as I was enjoying the summer festival’s melon race.
However, there are some game-breaking issues: some of the bonus chests are empty, which meant I never got the recipe for the broom, so I can’t fly to complete the main quest; I can’t get the whisk to work, so I can’t create honey, so I can’t help Lyra or Lily; and the game freezes at the end of the spa day, so I will never be able to complete that quest.
Another issue with Garden Witch Life is the lack of balance. From being involved in the community, receiving letters and giving tasks in the first couple of days, the residents soon forget about you, and conversation is limited. Making money is very difficult, as many starting items aren’t worth much, and the shop items are expensive to buy. Several of my expensive cooked dishes failed to sell, as I had only made one, and the community box doesn’t seem to like that. It gets boring to traipse around just watering crops and gifting whilst waiting for items to sell.
Most disappointingly, even with 3000+ compost spread over the land, the farm is still a wasteland, so I haven’t seen any of the cute animals.
The developers have released an update which is encouraging to read. Not only will they be addressing the issues gamers have experienced, but they are also looking at future content updates.
Gameplay
The controls are configurable from the settings menu, but unfortunately, any altered setting is reset on launch. By default, the menu buttons always appear on the screen. There is a drop in frame rate at certain points in Garden Witch Life, especially on rainy days or near the fairy portal. What could be seen by some as pretty, like the lightning flashes in the sky and the shadows flickering on the ground, might be an issue for others.
At times, the text is too small for the Switch Lite screen, and with so many icons looking similar, it makes it difficult to play. There are achievements, but there is no description as to what is required.
Garden Witch Life autosaves into one of three slots as you enter a new area. There are additional manual save slots, however, I couldn’t find a way of deleting any of my saves, other than overwriting them.
A day tends to last about 30 real-time minutes. Time does pause whilst using chests or the menu, but not when cooking or placing items.
Conclusion
I like so much about Garden Witch Life. The bees buzzing round the hives, the roses growing up the trellis fences, the exciting and different areas through the magical portal, the cooking mini-games and no dangerous mine monsters to battle with. However at present it feels more like an early access version, and whilst updates are welcome to resolve issues, I shouldn’t have to restart in order to benefit.
It is for the numerous issues I encountered that I can’t recommend Garden Witch Life at this moment. I sincerely hope that the developers weed out the problems, as there is a great farming/life sim game waiting to be unearthed.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure 
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