Mini Gardens - Logic Puzzle Reviews

Great, relaxing and beautiful game. Everythings works very well and match each other, design, graphics and soundtrack!

What a beautiful game! Both in images and in puzzles. The difficulty is progressive with well-designed solutions. The scenes that form after solving the puzzle are fantastic. Relaxing music that matches the style of the game.

A puzzle game with cute art, the levels are very challenging, and it has a lot of tutorials to help you in the beginning, the music is very relaxing too

Relaxing puzzle game, has a few tricky puzzles but most of them are straightforward to solve once you learn the rules. Took me about 3 hours to solve all of them, I enjoyed the time spent. Only complaint would be that the tips pop up on every level, would be nice to have a way to permanently turn those off.

This is Masyu: The Video Game. It's an extremely pretty and very juicy take on the paper puzzle Masyu, but it's mechanically just inferior to paper. The presentation makes lots of sense for making stuff pretty, and little sense for solving puzzles. That already begins with the dubious notion of presenting a rectangular Sudoku-style grid in an isometric perspective, and it continues with e.g. animations which temporarily obscure the level, plus recurring popups to remind you of the minimal rules. Fortunately the popups can be disabled. Overall verdict: I love the idea of presenting paper puzzles with video game graphics, but I don't think this game does that particularly well. To give an example of a game which I consider to do this much better, I recommend Cherry Creek, an utterly gorgeous take on the classic tile-turning puzzle game. All that said, this game is cheap and pretty, and these shortcomings are bearable in such a short game.

An inexpensive and short puzzler with challenging elements. Levels are sometimes constructed in ways that you need to think ahead several moves. Well worth the money and time.

A beautiful, minimal, calming puzzle game - which is right up my alley. The game is small and short, but polished and well worth the price for a few sessions of engaging puzzles. After a while you get used to the patterns and can work backward with the simple constraints to find the solution, but that's sort of the point of a game like this. It doesn't overstay its welcome; rather than trying to go overboard with puzzle count, it ends once you've experienced all that can be done with the given mechanics. More than worth a couple bucks if you like to relax with some puzzles!

Pleasant game with simple rules. Really easy to get started. Wish there was a way to undo or remove accidental hoses. Misclicked a couple times towards the end and had to redo the entire level. This game is worth playing but I wish there were more levels!

[u]In short:[/u] Mini Gardens is based on Nikoli's "Masyu" logic puzzle. If that doesn't ring a bell - it's "Pearl" from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (STPPC). Since STPPC comes with a well-made level generator that is completely free, Mini Gardens has a tough time competing. I like some aspects of the presentation, but theming and UI are not great and prone to confuse the logic. Despite being pretty short the pricing seems adequate. I have issues with it, but this game is neither terrible nor broken - I just find it obsolete given the available competition. While I don't personally recommend it - as long as you know what you're getting yourself into, it's a completely fine purchase. [u]In long:[/u] In terms of [b][u]gameplay[/u][/b] it's probably easier to read the rules of Masyu, the underlying logic game, on [url=https://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/masyu/]Nikoli's website[/url]. If that seems familiar to you, it's because Masyu rules were implemented as Pearl in the popular [url=https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/]Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection[/url]. Note how the original rules elegantly use black and white dots to denote special tiles on an otherwise empty grid. Mini Gardens on the other hand tries to tie Masyu to the theme of watering a garden. Instead of drawing lines on an empty grid, you connect pre-built sprinklers with hoses. That means even empty and unused tiles have sprinklers, which is an obvious source of visual clutter and confusion (as evidenced by some of the other reviews). Secondly, special tiles come with straight and curved sprinklers. But the rules only call for *some kind* of straight line or corner, meaning the initial orientation is essentially random. Seeing a pre-built corner not actually denoting the corner it is showing obviously doesn't help teaching the rules. Another problem is that this game is pretty light on [b][u]content[/u][/b]. After a short tutorial there are just 50 hand-made levels. At least the difficulty curve seems well done, gradually ramping up complexity. Beyond level 35 I started enjoying the layouts. On the last few levels the game finally abandons its unhealthy obsession with symmetry, which adds a little bit of challenge. But I want to be clear here - if you are unfamiliar with Masyu/Pearl I am not a good benchmark. I know the rules very well and blitzed through the game in under 90 min, while an average player seems to take around 4 hours (judging by other reviews). Still, even just 90 min of playtime leave me feeling the game is pretty fairly priced given how cheap it is, although a generator for random puzzles might have convinced me to give this an actual recommendation. As per usual for indie puzzle games, the [b][u]UI[/u][/b] is where a lot goes wrong. The isometric perspective looks good, but isn't all-too-great for puzzle solving. Thankfully the game allows you to switch to a top-down view (very handy!). Still this doesn't solve the problem that lines are hard to see (small hoses connecting sprinklers on visually busy dark tiles) and that while drawing them the game frequently doesn't recognize the first tile, leading to annoying double-backs. For how simple and elegant the rules are and for how well I know them, I found it surprisingly hard to conceptualize them given all the visual clutter: Sprinklers everywhere, tiny and hard-to-see puzzle elements, tiles changing colours, rules pop-ups and alerts (can both be disabled), etc. I should also note the lack of undo functionality. Starting over seemed easier than remembering the order and undoing it manually given how cluttered the board becomes. I've just mentioned how I'm not a huge fan of how the puzzles look, but apart from them the [b][u]presentation[/u][/b] is actually pretty well done. Finished levels spawn-in cute garden elements and then zoom out to show these titular "mini gardens" inside glass bottles in neat little dioramas. I generally like low poly dioramas and they are well done here! I wish I could explore them more honestly. Unfortunately there seems to be only around 15 unique visuals, meaning they repeat several times through-out the game. At first the garden elements seem to follow the level layout, but later tents or swimming pools just spawn in right where sprinklers are, which is a bit off-putting. In an in-game message the developer mentions that this was an "ambitious" game, which might be code for "original vision turned out to be too much work so I put everything on repeat after level 15". A bit of a shame since the developer seems to be good with visuals. Most dioramas integrate the mini gardens well, but some also seem fairly lackluster (why is there a glass bowl in the middle of a bridge?). The sound effects are nice and well used. The music is a passable loop that started to become grating after around 60 min. The [b][u]technical side[/u][/b] is satisfactorily. You're looking at a Unity game with separate volume sliders and a toggle for windowed mode, although the window size is sadly fixed. Having some settings only available from within the game and not from the main menu is a bit weird. Over-all nothing too terrible, but nothing great either. In [b][u]conclusion[/u][/b] this feels a bit like squandered potential. The logic puzzle aspect is rock solid (it's a carbon copy of Masyu after all). Similarly the visuals are pretty well done and neat. It's just the marriage of the two that doesn't quite work. The watering theme feels shoe-horned in and doesn't really gel with the logic puzzle rules, the UI is visually cluttered and confusing, the reward screens stop conforming to the level layouts after a while and start repeating. The controls being finnicky and the limited number of levels doesn't help either. I see some faint traces of mechanical potential in some of the later hand-crafted levels, but over-all to me it's just Pearl from STPPC with a much worse UI. If you really like the visual style, by all means - you are going to get your money's worth out of this since it's so cheap. Still - while I don't feel [i]too[/i] strongly about it, personally I would not recommend this game.

[b]mini gardens[/b] is a tranquil draw a single line puzzler with [b]50 levels[/b] unlocked one by one. the goal is to make sure every tile gets watered, so a pretty garden can flourish, but it's not about including every tile, just the ones with sprinklers. the concept is similar to [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/dohi64/recommended/1399670]instant farmer[/url], though that's a tile-switching/jigsaw situation. tutorial messages before the first few levels provide all the necessary info and full instructions can be brought up anytime. rules are a bit more complicated than I thought, but not overly so. even though I technically understood everything, my mistake was, I was looking at sprinklers and wanted to make sure every tile gets watered by drawing a line over it or at least next to it. as I said above, it's not necessary though, [b]just connect all the sprinklers according to the rules, they'll take care of dry tiles even a bit further away[/b]. well, I say 'just', but it's harder than it looks and levels get pretty big eventually. there are [b]two types of sprinklers, straight and curved[/b]. their initial direction means nothing, it's just a starting position, they will automatically rotate depending on where the line/pipe is coming from. can't change line direction on a tile with a straight one, but the line has to turn on the tile before and/or after the sprinkler. as for curved ones, can't cross them with a straight line and both the previous and next cell has to be straight, can't have two turns right after each other. controls are straightforward: drag lines with left click, remove segments with right click. you can let go of the mouse button, do different areas of the level, no need to draw the whole line in a single move. mouse wheel zoom is an undocumented feature, icons are available for level reset, 90-degree rotation in both directions, as well as a [b]top-down view[/b] (much more useful from a puzzling perspective) and a [b]relax mode button[/b], which fills in some of the level for you. it's not much help on later levels though. [b]the presentation is lovely.[/b] colorful gardens, clouds passing by (without covering half the screen), ambient sounds, calming music. and not only are gardens expanded with a few more things upon completion, but the game zooms out to reveal where they are located. playground, living room, kitchen, desert island, space, and so on. as minimalist as cutscenes can get, but I think it's a really nice touch. too bad locations repeat. separate volume settings, a windowed mode toggle with a smaller, fixed window and a post-processing toggle for increased performance are the only settings in the main menu, but you can toggle instructions, hints, the mistake indicator ('!' over a problematic tile) and change the color of the sprinklers while playing. even after internalizing the rules and ridding my mind of 'gotta water adjacent tiles' thoughts, I still [b]found the game relatively difficult[/b], so don't be fooled by the cute graphics. nevertheless, [b]it's a great specimen of this oft-seen subgenre, done well and with enough personality to stand out from the rest.[/b] by all means, give it a shot even at full price.