Garden of the Sea

by Aethyna Oct 24, 2024 | 1 Votes | 25 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Simulation

Graphics:

Labels:

Life Sim , Cozy , Exploration , Farm

Platforms:

Publishers:

Neat corporation In this game, you find yourself in an archipelago filled with unique plants to collect and grow and animals to befriend. There are plenty of interesting biomes/islands to explore, some of which even have puzzles you’ll need to solve and ruins to restore. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Garden of the Sea is a cozy, adventure-driven life simulation game that leans heavily on the farming aspect. In this game, you find yourself in an archipelago of some sort, filled with unique plants to collect and grow, and animals to befriend. There are plenty of interesting biomes/islands to explore, too, some of which even have puzzles that you’ll need to solve and ruins to restore. If you love playing life sims, farming sims, or cozy games in general, you will want to check out Garden of the Sea!

Gameplay

At its core, Garden of the Sea has two main aspects – exploration, where you’ll not only get to find unique plants and crops (and there are plenty to collect) to bring back to your budding garden, but you’ll also get various new tools to expand the scope of what you can do in the game, restore various ruins you find, and even solve puzzles; and gardening or farming, in which you’ll get to freely cultivate a host of plants in a sandbox manner - this means that you can plow and grow almost anywhere you like as long as it's on land and not blocked by other immovable objects.

Although the farming or gardening aspect of the game is fun and all, the highlight of this game is definitely the exploration aspect. It’s incredibly fun to just head out, first on foot but later by boat, to explore various new areas, each with their own unique set of flora and fauna to discover. You can collect what samples you can and bring them back to your little hovel where you can use the machine to turn them into seeds to plant and grow in your garden.

Most islands even have puzzles that you can solve, which does break up the monotony of just exploring every nook and cranny of an island. For instance, the bamboo island has a bamboo maze with a simple little “puzzle” to solve where you’re required to find three crystals hidden in the maze and place them at the altar to awaken the goddess. You will also get requests from what seems to be spirits of nature as indicated by the speech bubbles, though sometimes, what they want you to do might not be as straightforward, such as encountering a spirit holding an axe.

From time to time, you may even encounter ruins that you can then restore, provided that you have the resources the repairs need. The requests can range from raw materials which you can simply gather from the environment, to crops or fruits that you can most likely harvest from your garden, to even crafted items that you can craft via the crafting machine.

However, do note that you will need to have the blueprints first to know what raw materials you need to craft something and blueprints can be typically found by exploring and opening the occasional reward chest you may come across. The number of blueprints you get can be overwhelming at first, with no proper way to organize them, but once you have a proper home built, you’ll have a wall filled with grids to place and organize your blueprints.

To add to the host of activities you can do in this game, there are adorable animals that you can befriend by both petting them and giving them what they want (to eat). Sometimes, what they want isn’t just some raw fruit that you can just harvest from your garden – you will need to cook them first at the stove. Of course, there are many more “machines” that you can unlock (and craft) as you progress, including the fertilizer-making machine. None of these machines typically come with instructions, but they are designed intuitively enough that it doesn’t take a player too long to figure out how things work.

Garden of the Sea is an incredibly fun adventure-driven life sim, but it does have one fairly major downside. Since the game was originally developed for Virtual Reality (VR), some of the game design choices can cause nausea or motion sickness in players, even if this version of the game isn’t VR. I’m sure this issue only affects a portion (not all) of the player population, but if you happened to be a part of this group of players like me, you can’t play this game for extended periods of time without feeling sick. It may not be severe but it’s bad enough to put me off the game until I’m ready to take another crack at it. Unlike motion blur effects, there’s unfortunately nothing you can do via the settings to lessen the motion sickness effects in the game.

Graphics/ Sound

Garden of the Sea features that kind of cartoonish graphics that are typical of most cozy life sims. The color palette used here tend to be the vibrant and bright sort, though, thanks to the in-game day-and-night cycle and different biomes, you do get to see the other side of things.

In terms of sound, the game sticks to mostly featuring ambiance so you can expect to hear the sounds of nature such as the sound of birds chirruping along with the sparse (and barely audible) relaxing tunes in the background. There are also helpful sound effects to give what you do some weight.

Conclusion

For fans of cozy life sims, Garden of the Sea is definitely one game you don’t want to miss out. The game has incredible amounts of content to easily keep any player engaged for hours on end. Plus, it’s just fun to collect all the different kinds of plants you encounter and bring them back to your budding garden to grow. There’s a bit of a “gotta grow them all” feeling here that would delight any avid collectathon player.

New Game Added: Garden of the Sea

by Aethyna Oct 24, 2024

In this game, you find yourself in an archipelago filled with unique plants to collect and grow and animals to befriend. There are plenty of interesting biomes/islands to explore, some of which even have puzzles you’ll need to solve and ruins to restore.