Plantabi: Little Garden Review

Game: Plantabi: Little Garden
Genre: Idle Clicker
System: Steam (Windows)
Developer|Publisher: Adrian Corpuz
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $5.99 | UK £5.00 | EU € 5,75
Release Date: February 20th, 2024

Review code provided with many thanks to Adrian Corpuz.

Plantabi: Little Garden is a cozy little idle clicker game where you take care of plants and decorate your room at the same time. With each plant, with each new item, your room becomes more and more comfy to hang out it.

The Gameplay and Story of Plantabi: Little Garden

Plantabi: Little Garden doesn’t have much of a story; you like to take care of plants, so you decide to start buying up plants, taking care of them, and using them to make money. The store you purchase plants and supplies from sometimes asks for a specific kind of plant for a client, giving you even more money to get more plants and decorate.

When your plants get happy from the water and food you give them, they will level up. Level four plants can be propagated to make two, and the ensuing level one plants can be planted with the purchase of another pot to put the other half into. Then, you can sell the plant to make a tidy profit, keep it and grow it up to split it again, or just keep it and keep taking good care of it. If you forget to feed or water a plant, it will wither and die.

As you continue to grow your leafy friends, you will get quests from the shopkeeper for specific plants at specific levels, and each completed assignment will give you at least 1,000 coins to spend, as well as unlocking new furniture, plushies, plants, power-ups, and other items.

Playing Plantabi: Little Garden

Like many idle-clicking games, Plantabi: Little Garden is a relaxing, cozy, and nice-to-play video game. The art is beautiful and cute, the plants are adorable, and the game gives you a whole lot of items in the store to decorate your space. You have multiple rooms you can fill up with items and plants, and you have a lot of freedom to place items just about anywhere you want.

There are a whole bunch of different kinds of plants to unlock, and you can boost each plant with upgrades that can be purchased. There are more than sixty different kinds of plants to unlock, a massive pile of stuffed animals, pillows, other decorations, wallpapers, pots, windows, flooring, tables, racks, and more. It’s a lot of things that you can use to really make the space your own. The items unlock randomly, so you will get different flowers, plants, and decorations every time you start a game over.

The Downsides of Plantabi: Little Garden

I love this game. I like the music, the graphics, the way it plays, and the freedom you have when you play. However, I did come across a couple of issues I think could be improved upon to make Plantabi: Little Garden even better. One of the main things is the tutorial.

For the most part, tutorials are there to teach you how to play. When I review games, a lot of times, the tutorial seems to hold your hand and treat you like you don’t know how to play video games. Plantabi: Little Garden chose to go the other direction; it barely tells you anything and expects you to fill in the gaps all on your own. That might be okay for some types of games, but for Plantabi: Little Garden, it just kind of makes it frustrating.

I can tell that the developer thinks it’s fun that you need to fiddle with things to try and figure out how they work. But let me tell you, in the ten or so minutes it took me to figure out how to complete quests and start to unlock items, I would have probably given up on the game if I wasn’t reviewing it. I like that not everything is spoon-fed to you, but Plantabi: Little Garden just takes it a little too far the other way.

Another item that took me a while to figure out how to use was the power-ups, like the unlimited water and double gold. I could decorate with them, so I assumed that’s what I was supposed to do with them until I noticed it wasn’t working by sitting close to the plants I wanted it to work on. There is a menu you have to open up and equip the power-ups, too, and I was just not paying attention to how to equip them properly. It would be nice if each of the power-ups had a mouse-over menu that went into a brief description of what each of them does and how to equip them.

Conclusion

Plantabi: Little Garden is super fun, cozy, cute, and gives you a lot of freedom. I like the plants, I like the Cookie Clicker aspects of it, and the music is fabulous. If the tutorial were a little bit more robust, I would absolutely adore this plant-centric title.

Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.