Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator Reviews

The game is so relaxing. It's an after work must to relax. Love the art style the garden is so beautiful

🌱 Garden Life: A Cozy, Therapeutic Gem 🌼 This game is pure serotonin in digital form. You start with a small, overgrown patch of land and slowly transform it into your dream garden. Whether you're into structured landscaping or wild cottagecore chaos, there's room to express your personal vibe. The planting system is surprisingly deep with different soil types, flower preferences, growth stages, and the joy of hybrid experimentation. What I love: 🌷 The art style is soft and warm, like a storybook 🎶 The ambient sounds and chill music are perfect for relaxing 🪴 Watching your plants grow over real-time days feels rewarding 🐝 Bees, butterflies, and little critters give your garden life 📷 A photo mode to capture your best angles and floral flexes What could be better: 🌦️ I wish weather played a bigger role; maybe storms or seasons? 🎨 More decorations and garden paths please! 👩‍🌾 NPC interactions are minimal; more story/lore would be nice It's not a game you rush. It’s a game you live in. I play it with a cup of tea and no agenda ; just a to-do list of "plant daffodils" and "stare lovingly at my cosmos." TL;DR: Zen. Beautiful. Addictive in a soft, gentle way. A must-have if you love gardening, chill vibes, or just need a break from chaos. 🌼 9/10 ; My weeds have never looked this cute.

This game brings me a lot of joy, its relaxing, enjoyable, and even pulled at my heart. I recommend it big time for garden enjoyers.

If you enjoy going around and planting flowers as well as decorating. And then keeping the flowers happy, then its a game for you. I found myself easily loosing track of time with this game. Felt the speed at which the flowers grow is decent keeps you busy, no real sitting around and waiting on anything.

It is simplistic, not too difficult to understand, but the progression of the game can feel very slow at times, especially in the later stages and when going for completion. It is a great and relaxing experience, but you do need patience

Great little game. Keeps you occupied for hours. The graphics are beautiful and I love the variety of colors the plants come in. I do wish there were more plants.

ngl, the gameplay loop sucked me in. the graphics and music complement the sweet simple task of beautifying my simulated garden. simple daily tasks alongside long term collecting for the pavilion kept me balancing the amount of cuttings i had of each flower type and color and just WOW! <3

First off, I do absolutely love this game. But how am I supposed to write a good review if I get to a point in the game where half way through the day the game just keeps freezing. I can’t make progress since you only save at the end of every day. How could I rate this good if I can’t even play it? Incredible disappointment because IF this game was actually playable to me, this review would be incredibly different. There’s just no way to say it’s recommended or good if you ultimately cannot even play it. Very upsetting.

Was great until the last update. Now it crashes constantly and is virtually unplayable. I'm so disappointed as this used to be my go to game.

5/10 - Good game to play but decent drawbacks that deter long term commitment/enjoyment Pros: - Very appealing art style and semi-engaging storyline. - Voice acting is very nice and Robin's VA is great! - Nice natural feeling plant growth and models - Great item placement system - Very fun gardening simulation - The mix of crafting, gardening, seeding and etc. is nice Cons: - Lack of central story-line/engagement that makes the player want to fulfill requests aside from getting more spending money to purchase seeds or unlock items/areas/mechanics - Too little plant variety - The amount of plants in the game is padded out by all the different colors for each one but without ever expanding my garden I was able to have 1 of each and get the achievement. I struggle with making live and lush feeling gardens as the height disparity between plants makes it hard to layer properly. The lack of many very common plants also was a let-down. Some desired additions would be: + Black-Eyed susan or Coneflower for busy multi-bloom coverage + Mums + Lily of the valley + Daisy + Veggies! + Tree and shrub varieties like Junipers or making the Lilacs act like actual bushes + There are more but I can find more plant varieties looking out my window then in the game unfortunately. - Cost-reward ratio to unlocks is needlessly high, as an example; the main unlocks you have are via a board at the front of your plot, This only unlocks after fulfilling a request from one of the characters which was 3-4 requests in for me. Only after that can I buy the actual expansions themselves. the bridge was 500 florins, not too bad but I had a back-stock of plants I could use in the meantime. The greenhouse cost SEVEN THOUSAND florins, which is a huge leap and if I hadn't gotten the stall and a large back-stock of cuttings would have been a huge grind. After all that, I still can't use the greenhouse because of the characters needs a large request that's mandatory to actually unlock the doors - which I can't fulfill due to not having the plant colors required. The colors are random and I can't encourage them to make more without the green house so I just have a very expansive yard and nothing else. - Lackluster crafting and too reliant on money/purchasing components: You need sticks and rocks to craft a decent number of items in your shed, and the impression I got initially was that crafting decor for your garden was going to be an important part of decorating. It's not - you cannot get any new rocks aside from the ones already in your yard and you can't' get ANY sticks at all unless you purchase them in the shop. This effectively neuters any drive to craft decor at all since the cost-reward is not worth it and I can buy the same items for probably cheaper then it would be to buy the items then make them. The only renewing resource is leaf litter from weeds which makes 1 thing - wrapping paper which isn't even used in the bouquets which would justify it being so common. It can also be made into fertilizer but since everything grows overnight it really doesn't have a point as far as I can tell. - The lack of diversity in the game's areas is also a letdown, you could take jobs to landscape and create gardens for all these characters, which introduces ways to use enviormental storytelling to deepen the characters and your understanding of them. Help Frank fill out a sunflower patch or help Jasmine with her window boxes and you have to breed or grow the flowers in your garden and once you have all of them and deliver the live plants (good use case for the spade!!!) you are invited over to arrange and plant them for them. You can have this change with the seasons too\ - No veggies! Including veggies and other food would be a great way to diversify the plants and can even be worked into the already existing mechanics. Overall this is a great game for a chill relaxed gardening experience but the developers likely should be considering some expansions or major feature updates to make it worth full-price. I bought it for $13 and would see maybe $15 being the top price I'd be willing to pay for this game. They obviously put alot of love into the game but there is a great need for more content. Being a no-pressure cozy game doesn't mean you can leave out core content needed to make it worthwhile.