Garden Witch Life Review

Life hardly ever goes the way you expect; one moment, you’re thriving in the big city with a comfy job, but when you’re laid off and can’t face the thought of moving back home, a new world of possibilities opens up. This is the premise of Freetime Studio’s Garden Witch Life, a cosy 3D farming sim set on a magical island with a vacant ancient homestead in need of daily care to return it to its former splendour — perfect for a newly unemployed witch like you.

Designing your character’s appearance is delightfully full of cute and whimsical options, allowing you to mix and match up to three colours for your eyes, choose from a variety of hairstyles, and paint your face with stars, hearts, and more. The clothing options range from botanical styles like mushroom t-shirts and a sprout hat, or you can go for the more witchy items — the classic wide-brimmed conical hat and celestial accessories, for instance. You can even rock a bear onesie if that’s your jam. None of your choices have to be set in stone, either, as you’ll be able to change your appearance at any time using a crystal in your house. That said, the only thing I haven’t been able to change during my playthrough is my hair colour, and considering that you can adjust your skin, blush, and eye colour, this permanent hair dye might be a bug. In any case, once you’re done customising, just set your name and pronouns, and you’re ready to venture forth to Moonflower Island!

Garden Witch Life’s premise is simple: you’re a witch looking to start a new life after your company laid off 50% of its workforce. When you arrive at Moonflower, you make your way to the local café, confide your troubles to its cheery owner, May, and take her up on the offer to crash on her couch for the night. The next day, she leads you to a magical empty treehouse surrounded by a wide, circular area of land inundated with rocks, weeds, and hard-packed soil. It’s a familiar humble beginning for any farming sim player, a rough canvas to turn into your own beautiful painting of abundance. Right away, I appreciated how large the farming space would eventually be once I cleared out all the dry Crystal Wheat in the way, and I was charmed by the tall, dreamy treehouse, which looked like it was plucked straight from a fairytale book — all in all, it was a great first impression.

Early quests arrive via the mailbox in front of your house; May sends you starter seeds and a cooking recipe, and you’re supposed to visit a character named Tin at the forge for tools. You’ll quickly settle into a loop of cleaning your garden, planting in-season seeds, and meeting the small community in town — from the shy beekeeper Lily to the boisterous merchant Rudal. You also temporarily get an adorable ghost to guide you through these opening moments and explain how to heal the garden’s soil since your first seedlings look a little worse for wear. I wish the ghost would’ve stuck around as a recurring character, but they do disappear once you find your footing.

After 20 hours of gameplay, I’d describe my garden as chaotically beautiful, with a wide variety of flowers, trees, and herbs in bloom. You’re given free rein around your house to plant nearly anywhere you’d like, and you’re not restricted to a grid, so placement feels rather organic. When you click a seed to plant, you’ll have a circle showing you how large the crop will eventually grow, and specific colours reveal how it complements other plants around it. Purple indicates that the plants will get along growing side-by-side, retaining more water and nutrients for longer. Red, on the other hand, means plants will pull resources from the soil faster and lose health quicker if they’re low on nutrients. Adding compost and watering regularly help your crops thrive while simultaneously healing the surrounding soil, so the more you grow, the more farming space you’ll earn. A wide variety of cute creatures also make their way to your bountiful land, including cows, frogs, snails, ducks, and so many more (yes, you can pet them all); the nice thing is that they are not just passing visitors, as you can build homes and cook food to get them to stick around and yield more resources, such as eggs, feathers, etc.

Harvesting plants is pretty fun, as well, since you can gain different items depending on which stage of the growth cycle your crop is in. For instance, picking a Dandelion early on might only yield a Dandelion Leaf, but if you wait longer, you could get a Dandelion Flower, and if you wait even longer from there, you could get a Dandelion Puff Ball — all of which are used in a variety of recipes. Sometimes, plants may only yield seeds, which is convenient if I’m trying to rearrange my garden since there’s no way to move them once they're already planted.

Though I’d say Garden Witch Life succeeds at the gardening portion of its title, I’m still wondering where the actual witchiness comes in. It feels less like your character is a witch, and more so like your character just enjoys a witchy aesthetic for clothes and decor. Sure, you cook food in a cauldron, but the actual process of cooking feels very ordinary — simply add ingredients, heat, and stir. There’s a glaring lack of enchantment in most things that you do, and oftentimes, the “magical” aspects of the game evoke more of a cosy sci-fi vibe, which feels out of place. Additionally, your character’s dialogue rarely references being a witch despite it supposedly being a main part of your identity. So far, the most magical thing I’ve done is create a broom to surf around on, but even that is a little lacklustre and clunky to use, as it mostly feels like you’re gliding on it with a limited range of movement. Even completing quests feels remarkably not witchy, as you’re mostly fetching items, cooking or crafting (in a non-magical way), or simply waiting for NPCs to research something.

What was rather disappointing was the significant lack of community on Moonflower Island. A majority of the nine NPCs stay in their respective houses or shops, aside from one pair that walks a short distance around the town. May’s café never has customers, for instance, and the main square looks designed to be a communal hub, but no one hangs around there. The characters themselves are rather dull and underdeveloped, as much of their interactions are front-loaded into the opening, and then they promptly stop having anything interesting to say afterwards other than to serve as living shop kiosks. Much of my interactions consisted of a greeting, and then I’d have the option to give them a gift or say goodbye. If I already gave them a gift, then it’d just be a quick hi and bye. They don’t comment on the changing seasons, daily life, or anything else, and most of the residents don’t acknowledge each other, which is unfortunate considering the beginning of Garden Witch Life seemed to promise a strong sense of community. Instead, I get an overwhelming feeling of emptiness every time I head into town.

You can get some of the characters to open up and give you quests if you ply them with gifts to up their friendship, but it takes a lot of gifting, and most of the time, it’ll feel like you aren’t getting anywhere. At one point, I did unlock a new conversation with a character that implied I and the NPC have really gotten to know each other, but my interactions have simply been limited to giving them items up to that point, so that felt a bit odd. Additionally, it seems that relationship quests don’t pop up consistently when you hit friendship milestones; for instance, while two characters gave me a quest at relationship level 5, I’ve surpassed that point with several other characters and am still just getting hi-and-bye type interactions. I’m not sure if that’s just a bug or if that content didn’t have time to be implemented, but even so, it’s underwhelming.

Unfortunately, relationships do impact your progression in terms of completing quests and developing your garden, as some merchants only sell better items or necessary recipes if you increase their friendship levels, which makes the whole gift-giving process more like a chore. Most new stock is also extremely expensive, and making gold in this game is quite difficult, so you don’t typically feel rewarded for unlocking those new items anyway since you’re halted by a high price tag.

The items that yielded the most gold were cooked dishes, and while I found the process of cooking fun at first, it quickly became repetitive if I were making more than one thing at a time. You’re very much involved in every part of the cooking process; for example, you’ll have to chop ingredients on a cutting board, turn them into powder with a mortar, fry them up in a frying pan, etc. Preparing ingredients or making a meal usually takes you to a different screen where you’ll use your mouse to chop or whisk something, but you can’t make things in stacks, so if, for instance, you want to whisk 12 Honeycombs into 12 Honey, you’ll need to make each one individually, which gets tedious. Sometimes, it also gets dangerously buggy, such as the cutting animation freezing when slicing Roses into Petals or a frying pan refusing to pick up Eggs when hovering over them.

I typically love how seasons feel different in games like these, but aside from the snowy winter, each season in Garden Witch Life feels, well, the same. Sure, some crops disappear in the summer and autumn, but for the most part, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what season it is without looking at the little icon in the top-right corner of my screen. The main town doesn’t decorate differently between seasons either, making it feel like a perpetual spring day. While I love the visual change when winter arrives, it unfortunately brings with it floating plants and glitchy terrain, which dampens some of that cosiness.

There are some other frequent gameplay hiccups, such as my character easily getting stuck exploring the environment or items not working on my hotbar if I took them directly from a storage chest; I’d have to switch to a different tool or item and switch back to be able to use them. I also encountered many broken interactions inside buildings where I’d have a prompt to press “E”, but nothing would happen. Other things were minor but noticeable, like the way whisking Honey looked exactly the same as whisking an Egg, Cream, or Cake Batter. There are also many aspects that left me wondering, “What’s the point of including this?” One merchant sells useless bits and bobs, but I thought if I upped my friendship with him, he’d sell something interesting — that’s yet to be seen. May, a seemingly important character at the start of the game, has had nothing to say to me, no matter how many gifts I give her. There’s also a spa that’s closed in the beginning, one of your goals being to open it back up, but once you do, it’s just… there. I’ve visited it several times, hoping it’d have some use, but I’ve been disappointed each time.

Unfortunately, the more I played, the more I got the sense that Garden Witch Life needed more time in development to iron out some of its bugs and flesh out its world. The flow of progression could’ve also used more care as you’re frequently halted by arbitrary wait times or low friendship levels, making you go through long periods without meaningful rewards or new interactions. In its current state, it feels closer to an Early Access game, and in a genre overflowing with similar titles, it falls short, but I can see the potential. I really enjoyed taking care of my garden and seeing it teeming with life, and if the other aspects of gameplay didn’t feel so unrewarding and if it properly incorporated the “witch” part of its title, I’d like it a lot more.