The Garden Path

by Aethyna Aug 25, 2024 | 1 Votes | 48 Played | 0 Reviews

6 rate

Genres:

Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Life Sim , Garden , Cozy , Fishing

Platforms:

Publishers:

Mooncat Games The Garden Path is a cozy, slice-of-life gardening sim game where you get to wander through nature, inspecting various flowers, plants, and trees, and possibly bringing their seeds back to your little garden haven to grow. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

The Garden Path is a cozy, slice-of-life gardening sim game where you get to wander through nature, inspecting various flowers, plants, and trees, and possibly bringing their seeds back to your little garden haven to grow. You’ll also meet various interesting characters along the way, and you can sometimes obtain new tools from them or trade them. The game is designed to be enjoyed in short sessions since the in-game time follows real life, though you can experience all four seasons in the game within around a month.

Gameplay

As a cozy game, The Garden Path features a pretty chill gameplay. In fact, as mentioned before, the game is designed to be enjoyed in short sessions rather than a gaming marathon since the in-game time mimics that of real life. However, the game does account for the four seasons in a more feasible sense, allowing players to experience all seasons within just a month (or 28 days, to be specific) as opposed to an entire year.

The game map is segmented into different grids but you can seamlessly move from one grid to another without you even noticing it. The grids are mostly there to make it easier for you to custom mark points of interest and the locations of other interesting vegetable-themed NPCs you may have found while wandering the garden. These NPCs aren’t just there to interact with you and eventually tell you their stories, but some of them can also trade with you or help you unlock a new skill by providing you with a new tool, such as fishing for various song-fishes in any body of water. Eventually, some of them may decide to settle down and make their homes next to yours.

There’s even a fun little mini-game that you have to play to catch a fish which involves keeping the musical note within the highlighted circle. The idea is that song-fishes love music and will let themselves be caught if they like the tune you’re whistling. Song-fishes come with various abilities when used as well. For instance, you can use a Beech Fish to sprout some beech seedlings from the ground to grow into beech trees.

Some NPCs only appear during certain times of the day or during certain weather, such as rain. There are even travelling merchants that can trade with you, providing you with access to various seeds, décor, and tools. Discovery is a main aspect of the game and it encourages the player to explore at their own time and pace the huge world it offers.

Of course, being a garden sim, you’ll also get to plant and grow various plants. You can do so by collecting seeds from the different plants and trees found in the wild or simply buying seeds you want from a merchant. Aside from collecting a variety of materials from the plants and tree you encounter, you can even “record” a plant or tree to learn more about them. As the game adheres to the 24-hour clock, your plants will grow in tune with real-time progression even when you’re not actively playing the game.

However, the developers understand that players don’t really want to wait months just for a new season to come around, so although time in this game mirrors real life, for seasons, you can experience all four of them within 28 days or around a month.

The Garden Path also comes with some quests to give players some form of purpose in the game. They are entirely optional, but if you want to get Tones as a reward, you might want to choose to complete them. Most of the quests are, unfortunately, rather uninspired – think the kind of busywork quests that MMOs often set you on.

One feature I really like in this game is how it shows your achievements as you progress. Instead of a plain old list with achievement icons and checkmarks, each achievement is depicted as a star in the sky. Completing an achievement makes the star light up. Once you have enough of them, you can even start to see constellations forming, which is pretty fun. It feels like you’re painting the night sky as you play.

Personally, as a working mum with young children, The Garden Path satisfies my thirst for gaming and my love for cozy games with bite-sized sessions that I was able to fit into my daily routine. Unfortunately, as fun as the game is, The Garden Path lacks crucial information about certain aspects of its gameplay. I often find myself stumbling around, trying to figure out how to do something or what this thing does. The UI isn’t well-designed either, oftentimes resulting in an experience that’s more frustrating than relaxing.

Even the highlight feature, a basic staple of the game, took me way too long to fully make use of. Of course, the game isn’t exactly glitch-free, either. Even early on during the tutorial, I encountered a pretty major glitch that stopped me from progressing. After equipping my axe, the icons in my inventory became jumbled or had placeholder icons (a box). The game also didn’t register me as having equipped the axe, which halted my tutorial progress. This kind of issues shouldn't really be present in a full release, I think. That said, I hope the developers do get on these issues fast and fix them.

Community

The Garden Path may come across as a single player game, but you might be surprised to know that the game supports local co-op, allowing you to bring along a buddy or a loved one to tend to your garden together.

Graphics/ Sound

The Garden Path features grainy art style that may remind one of children’s storybooks back when they were young, along with a color palette that provides the game with a mellow look and atmosphere. In terms of sound, The game manages to capture the relaxing and peaceful ambiance of nature, complete with the sounds of bird calls in the distance and the crunch of the grass as you walk the garden path.

Conclusion

The Garden Path may be designed with coziness in mind, but as it currently stands, the game is quite a chore to play. Glitches aside, the game can be a bit too vague with certain aspects of its gameplay, which is further compounded by UI that’s not very user-friendly, forcing players to mostly stumble around as they try to figure things out. For a game that’s supposed to be played in bite-sized sessions, spending most of that session trying to learn what a game feature does doesn’t strike me (or other players) as being incredibly fun.

However, once you manage to get through all of that, the game can provide what it originally sets out to do – a cozy game where you can just turn your brain off for a moment, and just enjoy the art, vibe, and ambiance.