Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator ( PS5, PS4, PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One)

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is a game that takes its namesake seriously. You play as a gardener who has recently come to own a new gardening space. Everything in the game revolves around growing your garden, and you won’t find elements like dating or getting to know townsfolk like in some other sim titles. Below we take a look at what the gameplay loop is like, how many hours you can realistically put in the game, and if it’s worth the price.

Putting Down Roots

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator starts out much like any other sim. You are a new gardener who has just arrived on their first day of work. With the help of a friendly old lady named Leslie will help you get started. In the first few minutes, you learn how to weed your garden and plant flowers. Before long, you learn how to water them, and then the day ends. Within the next few days, things start to expand. You even come into contact with a helpful ghost.

From here, you work towards opening a stall to sell your flowers, completing sculptures, and marking off tasks on the former gardener's list. If you don’t feel like playing the story mode, there is also a creative mode. Here, you can freely decorate the garden until your heart's content without having to worry about working towards milestones and making money. Which of these modes you choose to play is up to you, and you can switch at any time by moving back to the main menu.

A charming story plays out through the characters who visit your garden. Each one of them is helpful in their own way and excited to help you grow. While the story isn’t too deep, it’s the perfect amount of cozy to keep you playing for more, without making you feel pressured to rush through the story mode. The characters feel like pleasant visitors instead of NPCs that are trying to quickly push you through a narrative.

Gardening is a Patient Hobby

The main focus of this game is the gameplay loop, which can get overwhelming at times.  You start out with Daffodils and Roses. You can buy new seeds from Leslie’s store to fulfill more requests. Requests appear at the start of your day in the mailbox and ask for certain flowers or bouquets. There are also story quests that have harder challenges to complete. By completing requests, you get more money to buy more seeds, and this is the only way to earn profit at first. Once you open the market stall, you can sell seeds and flowers. This is where things get a bit tricky, though.

Flailing Flowers

There is a long list of flowers, and if you're not a plant aficionado like me, things get messy quickly. When I just had the two flowers at the start of the game, things were easy to sort. Everyone knows what a rose looks like, and daffodils are pretty recognizable as well. As you place down more plants though, it’s hard to remember what’s what. Not all of the plants are easy to recognize as well. While you have your basic Poppys, there are plenty of unusual flowers like Fatsia. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the game displayed the name of the plant when you hover over it.

For players like myself who enjoy trying out new cozy games, it is a huge problem. While you eventually learn the plants, it can take quite some time and may turn away players as this makes completing tasks way more difficult. When you need to get ten Hydrangeas, but aren’t familiar with which of your bushes gives them it can be a bit messy. This also leads to my second major problem, which is the quests. You can’t tack the quests to your main screen, so you constantly have to go into your menu to check what flowers you need. These two problems combined together can be quite irritating. You have to have a lot of patience to learn, and a notepad to remember your quests.

Growing Your Business

Days tick by rather quickly when playing Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator. During which you follow the same routine. You arrive at the garden in the morning. From there you pull up weeds, then water your flowers. After this, you can clip off the flowers that have grown to sell for profit or to complete quests. There’s also the possibility that bugs may have infested a few plants. This requires the player to spray pesticide to get rid of those. Once your current plants are taken care of you can use fertilizer. This is made from weed compost to help them grow faster. This gives you multiple flower yields in a day. Every plant has a different speed at which it grows flowers. With and some seeming to grow a bit quicker than others. 

If you need to pass time you can sit on a bench, but as soon as it’s time to take the bus back home. Alternatively, you can focus on placing new furniture around your garden or running to town to take care of errands. This is the gameplay loop for the whole game. You can, of course, expand your garden by completing story quests, but there is a limit to how many plants you can have growing at once. Luckily, you can dig up plants with your trusty shovel so switching them out is easy. The next part of flower growing is where things get tricky.

A Seeding Story

In order to complete story quests, you will need to grow special flowers. For example, you have to grow pink roses. Getting a variant is completely left up to RNG so you can be waiting in-game weeks for the seeds to show up. Depending on your preferences, this can really disrupt your gameplay experience. I enjoyed my garden but wanted to get the bridge to expand after about seven hours. The problem was that I was extremely unlucky with seed variants. This took me away from the cozy aspect a bit. I was a tad perplexed as the variant system wasn’t explained well and a bit frustrated when I realized that I was just being unlucky. This took me a, making the game less fun. I would like to mention that this can be avoided by playing creative mode if you're like me and just want to decorate.

 You also have the option to automate the gardening process to skip days simpler. You can buy a garden hose that makes water easier than the watering can. There are also items that keep weeds from growing and bugs from appearing. If you really want to skip days, then you can put down sprinklers with these so that your garden takes care of itself. The choice of how involved you want to be in the process is completely up to you. All you need to worry about is making enough money at your market stall to afford these items. I promise it’s not too hard though. As soon as I had a large garden going I was pulling in quite a bit of money each day just selling basic flowers.

The Beauty of Nature

The final thing that players should note is the game's visuals and music. I loved the soundtrack and it didn’t get repetitive over hours of gameplay. It was just pleasant to listen to on loop. As for the art, the game is gorgeous. The flower models match their real-life counterparts pretty well and the game is just made to be pretty. The character designs are also charming as are the cell-shaded animals you will find around the world. Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator may not have the graphical punch of an AAA title, but there’s no debating that it’s gorgeous and you can make some beautiful gardens that are just soothing to look at.

The furniture even follows this same line of thinking. You can place whimsical statues like frogs with hats, or cute ghosts. Everything is made to look good in your garden, it just depends on what your style is. There is even a small crafting element in the garden shed to let you whip up some of your own furniture without paying for it.

Playing With Nature

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is a gorgeous game you can lose hours of time in. It’s mostly free of bugs, has a cozy atmosphere, and for those who love plants, a great choice. It’s easy to get lost for hours in the game. This is because you can keep starting over to decorate a variety of gardens with different plants and furniture. For anyone who likes a more relaxing gameplay style than that found in busy farming sims, this game is a great choice. The only downsides are the RNG variants and the lack of flower naming and quest pinning. These are small qualms that could be adjusted in a future update, and will only affect you while you are learning the plants in the game.