Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator Review

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator's opening takes no time before hitting you with the feels. As you sift through photographs and listen to the voiceover of a warmly written welcome letter, you’ll find out you’re taking over a community garden after the previous organiser, Robin, was taken from the world far too soon. To honour Robin’s memory, you’ll help the garden bloom with life once again, replacing weeds and mossy rocks with an abundance of colourful flowers.

The opening was more sombre than I expected, but it still set a cosy mood. I was definitely looking forward to meeting the community members from the photos, whom Robin had cultivated strong relationships with, and I was ready to bring the garden back to its former glory. Unfortunately, my first 15 minutes of Garden Life took a turn for the worse. Following the opening cutscene, my game would completely freeze. A bus was supposed to drop me off and drive away, but I could only hear the sound effects of that happening, and visually, everything was a frozen blur. After about five restarts, updating drivers, and other possible fixes I could think of, I found a workaround that stillalive studios suggested, which ultimately allowed me to get past the bus driving off and begin the tutorial.

Troubleshooting isn’t the best start, especially with a title that’s supposed to be relaxing and cosy, but thankfully, that was the end of my technical problems with Garden Life. Once I got in, I slipped on my imaginary gardening gloves, breathed in the whimsical setting, and set out collecting weeds, as you would in most cosy farming sims like Coral Island and Stardew Valley. But unlike those games, you won’t find vegetables or fruits in this community garden; instead, you’ll grow all sorts of lovely flowers, such as tulips, sunflowers, and hellebores. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to care for each budding seed, as you’ll simply plant, fertilise, and water them and watch them grow in the blink of an eye. I’m exaggerating a bit, but the process from seed to full bloom is much quicker than I was expecting. You could clip a plant down multiple times during an in-game day and have it fully grow back at least once or twice before nightfall.

In fact, Garden Life is all about ease, making it as relaxing as you’d expect. I enjoyed the freedom of planting seeds and placing decor anywhere in the garden, as it doesn’t restrict you to a grid layout. The kind of haphazard way I organised my flowers felt very organic, simulating the feel of my actual garden at home. As for the day/night cycle, you’re not knocked out cold when the clock strikes a certain hour. You also never have to worry about timed quests, as any tasks you acquire from the community or from the to-do list in your shed can be done at your own pace. I honestly slipped into a nice loop of caring for my plants that I didn’t think about the fact that I actually had other stuff to do. The only thing that really adds difficulty is keeping your flowers safe from pests, but even then, that’s easy too; you have an unlimited supply of bug spray, effective bug hotels to keep pests away, and a good amount of time to address the problem. If your flowers do die, you can simply dig them up and receive the seeds back into your inventory with no penalty. After spending hours with the game, I can say this “don’t sweat it” design makes it great to unwind with.

While Garden Life excels at establishing a cosy vibe with its aesthetics and easy-going gameplay, there are some hiccups that make it a less polished experience, introducing small moments of frustration that pile up as you play. For instance, when using the pruning shears, you have to click repeatedly to collect your cuttings, and when you need nearly 50 flowers for some tasks, an option to hold the mouse button down rather than click would be much welcomed. Additionally, your inventory management is quite tedious in a few different ways. For one, your personal pack’s space is quite limited, and there’s no way to upgrade to get more bag slots, so it’ll quickly fill up with various plants, weeds, and/or seeds, and when that happens, extra items are automatically thrown into your shed’s cabinets. However, managing the cabinet space is difficult with so many seed packets, colour variants, and flower cuttings; unfortunately, there’s no way to auto-sort them, making you spend more time organising than tending to your garden.

Speaking of tasks, they get repetitive after a couple of hours; your neighbours are constantly asking for sunflowers, hydrangeas, daffodils, or other plants in exchange for Florins, Garden Life’s currency. Even though the type of plants they’re requesting changes, fulfilling the orders feels the same, which gets a bit old. Additionally, some design choices made the atmosphere feel a bit lifeless, which is ironic since you’re constantly surrounded by blooming flowers. The problem is, for a game that’s all about community, that seems to be the thing it’s missing the most. If you see your neighbours, they’ll appear in a visual-novel-style dialogue pop-up briefly, but usually, you feel very alone in this world; the emptiness is especially apparent in the village square, which seems like a place that should be bustling with life but feels deserted. I’m not saying I need to see characters walking around the environments, but an option to at least click a 2D character portrait and talk to someone would go a long way.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, is the game’s plant limit, which is easily reached before you hit any progression milestones. Although you’re given a quest to unlock more garden space by rebuilding a cute bridge over a creek, that extra land doesn’t allow you to plant more flowers if you’ve already hit the limit. You can, however, dig up seeds you’ve already planted and move them. As such, progression feels kind of anticlimactic. I couldn’t help but ask myself why I went through the trouble of turning in all those floral bouquets only to gain space but not the ability to put more in that space. I suppose I progressed for the opportunity to… move things around? Reorganise? That’s not nearly as satisfying.

As it is, Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator looks beautiful at every turn and nails the relaxing, low-stakes gameplay that I’d want from a cosy sim, but in the 11 hours I’ve spent with it, the less fun I’ve had. From excessive clicking to repetitive quests, along with lacklustre progression, it seems the most fun to be had is in the first few hours when everything still feels novel, and the possibilities of what your garden could be are still exciting.