![]() There’s an energy meter too that prevents you from swinging your weapons too many times, though this expands over time. Those requests, for instance, are soon repeated countless times, constantly demanding you defeat the same enemies or collect the same resources. On the one hand Garden Story offers a relaxing experience in a unique pastel world that’s a refreshing take on the RPG genre compared to more action-packed competitors.Įqually, though, that slow pace can turn simplistic gameplay into a chore. But that slow pace is a strength and a weakness. It’s a wholesome experience that’s cute, cosy and gently-paced. There are also building and growing elements with which you can customise the towns, but they’re largely optional and undercooked. Your weapons are farming tools, with the dual purpose of combat and resource collection. There you’ll defeat a boss and then move on to the next seasonal area. They’re all split between conflict, maintenance and foraging that are slowly levelled up over time to unlock new tools or story beats.Īnd so the main rhythm of the game involves completing requests and collecting resources to improve your tools, before access is granted to the dungeon of the area. What ensues is a quest that merges elements from The Legend of Zelda and Stardew Valley into a slow and gentle experience.Įach of the communities are fairly demanding, loading up a jobs board with requests each day that range from defeating enemies to fixing bridges or collecting resources. To do that, you must rebuild the community and connect four areas named after the seasons. It’s up to you, a tiny little grape guardian, to save the world. Importantly, food isn’t gendered which means here every character is referred to with they/them pronouns.Ī tree of mana presides over the world, but it’s been infected by the slow corruption of the Rot. In fact, the whole world is inhabited by sentient fruit and veg. Spring cannot arrive soon enough, frankly.Few games are as cute and adorable as Garden Story, a game in which you play as a grape. A perfect Sunday afternoon diversion, which left me intrigued and feeling slightly kinder to the world at large. The demo's not huge but still, I lost myself in this world a little bit. ![]() My favourite element of the demo is probably the literature stuff: you can cash in leftover resources back at the shack where you sleep and they're turned into lost books for the town library, each one telling you about this place one page at a time, with missing pages tempting you to go back out and find the resources that will fill them in. The combat's great and the dungeoning is fun, and as ever with these things there is a simple pleasure to exploring the tumbledown world and thinking about how nice it will be when you fixed it. Alongside the stick I was hitting stuff with I also got a sickle by doing a solid for a lazy tomato, and there's a dowsing rod, which is essentially a fishing rod, that allows you to do damage too. There's a stamina gauge to watch and enemies strike back every now and then, but the demo at least is very gentle. Push those crates!Ĭombat and harvesting are all handled the same way: you have a weapon of some kind and you hit stuff. In the demo, you visit a new area that has fallen into ruin, do a few favours for a few people and then rattle through a mini-dungeon where simple combat combines with sokoban puzzles. ![]() Your job is to restore a town to prosperity, harvesting stuff, clearing stuff up, knocking about gooey purple enemies known as the Rot. This is fairly well-travelled territory by now, but it doesn't stop Garden Story being wonderful. The demo was available on Steam over the last few days, while the game itself is out sometime in Spring. In Garden Story, a sort of town-rebuilding RPG for PC and Mac, with dungeons and beautiful chunky pixel art and a sweet nature, you play as Concord, a grape with a mission of regeneration. ![]() Then I realised it was a grape, so I guess I fell in love with a grape. This weekend I fell in love with a blueberry.
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