Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator readily identifies itself in the title. Encouraging players to engage with its structure at a relaxed pace, growing an ideal garden is the goal in either mode and limited friction makes for a solid time.
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator has no qualms readily identifying its goals to players.
This is not an entry in the simulation genre meant to dissolve players’ time into crystalline tasks of micro-management. In the past handful of years, simulations seemed to have undergone a sea change in their ability to produce meme-worthy content. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy is Powerwash Simulator, an entry that briefly captured a mindshare of streamers and the gaming community at large.
Powerwash Simulator had a dazzlingly simple goal. Eradicate the grime and dirt from virtually every virtual surface the game tasked you to do. Similar myopic objectives bleed into the varying Farming, Truck, Flight, and other simulators that hope to tantalize the specific group of players wishing to replicate a specific task in video game form.
Garden Life isn’t a joke simulator. It’s not going to garner love because of its ability to require silly tasks for completion. And perhaps it lacks the attention to detail required of games needing expert management. This is, ultimately, A Cozy Simulator in concept and name.
Very little about Garden Life is unapproachable. Developer stillalive Studio introduces the concept of a massive garden needing tending through the death of the player character’s mentor. Throughout the narrative, players will meet a small cast of characters that evoke a specific kind of warmth befitting the vibe of the game. Friendly faces are abound, willing to provide the player with a sense of community and camaraderie. We’ve been gifted this almost ramshackle garden with the task of injecting new life in it and completing requests throughout the community.
During my cozy time in Garden Life, I don’t remember many of the requests asked. Gathering flowers for bouquets, helping out wedding plans… it all revolves around planting flowers, decorating walkways, arranging bushes, and keeping things organized. It would be easy to call Garden Life almost lackadaisical in essence but stillalive isn’t approaching the simulation from a place of detachment. Instead, there’s an air of compassion in the ability to provide players with a space to plant, decorate, and tend to without forcing too much direction.
And I think that lack of intense direction is the primary victory and goal of Garden Life. Keep the hardcore simulation and management in games that already provide it. Toss tedious collection and time wastes to mobile games. Here, the process of watering plants, collecting pedals, discovering seeds, digging up dead bushes, keeping away insects, and placing decorations has an ease to it. The garden players are provided with is a sandbox meant to be filled but not obsessed over in fear of reaching some kind of fail state. Time will tick away and most flowers bloom in a day or so. No task required to “progress” or complete a quest will rip the player away from their gardening for too long.
Outside of the garden, there’s a town square players can visit to shop for tools and other items, in addition to selling things. The cast of characters is also met here, usually offering a bit more insight into their personalities. New shops open up over the course of the game and it was lovely hearing most things being voice acted by a relatively accomplished cast.
Not pressuring players too much towards a strict goal outside of making the world a more colorful place with the fruits of labor grants a wonderful sense of purpose towards the garden. You create this garden because you want to, quests give you a slight push but not a shove. It’s a small gesture that encapsulates the “cozy” aspect of Garden Life.
That being said, I readily identify the lack of hard goals may deter those looking for a different sense of whimsy or accomplishment. Look… Garden Life is a niche title for people looking for a specific kind of game. I know someone who loves Cult of the Lamb but primarily just building a cult and not worrying about the dungeon crawling. That same person enjoys placing objects around their island in Animal Crossing and little else. I’m not that kind of player for the most part but can appreciate what is on offer here.
The lack of friction between player and the action of building out the garden is so minimal, it’s almost purposeless. But that’s okay! There’s a delicate balance between opting into Story Mode which tasks players towards the growth of the garden and the development of characters and the Creative Mode which allows free reign of planting and building without the hindrance of needing to earn supplies. While that freedom is intoxicating, I can’t help but lament the technical restrictions seemingly in place in Garden Life. There is a limit towards how bountiful the garden can be and I think most players will wish more decorations and plants could be added as the garden continues to expand. It’s perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the game and one I’m not sure could or will be rectified with a simple patch.
Those limitations also extend to the inventory system, which I think can be somewhat clumsy. Menus for inventory aren’t the best organized, usually in a radial menu and chunks of blocks. When seed and petal counts explode, it can be a lot. Thankfully, the process of interacting with the world–from digging, to clipping, to rotating items perfectly, towards just about anything else–is easy to understand and executed without fuss. stillalive ensured that this would be as cozy and harmless an experience as possible.
Finally, I can’t help but gush over the visual style of Garden Life. Much of it resembles an oil painting, with colors smeared in a painterly way. It isn’t the most crisp looking game out there but reminded me of Season: A Letter to the Future. The word looks like it was crafted with a brush, from character portraits to the stylized objects that can be placed anywhere one chooses because its not dictated by a grid. It helps the player get further lost in what the game is trying to sell.
Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is just that: cozy. There’s little reason to strive for perfection in a game that merely wants players to dabble in its goal of building whatever kind of idyllic flower patch desired. This kind of directionless aura may be a turn off for those seeking a different kind of simulator but what’s on offer is hard not to enjoy.
