Confetti’s Cozy Corner: Tiny Garden
Tiny Garden is a farming sim love letter to millennials who grew up on Polly Pockets. While the cozy space is a bit saturated in the farming sim genre, there are gems that shine through with their creativity that make water crops, flowers and planning out plots of land refreshing.
Tiny Garden by indie developer Ao Note, combines the nostalgia of Polly Pocket with farming sim & puzzle mechanics to form a very unique experience. You begin the game by opening your pocket sized magical toy, which casts a very inviting feeling. After working your way through explanations of the basic mechanics of farming, planting seeds and terrain you then begin to plan your garden one step at a time.
Each crop has its own needs when it comes to terrain and harvest time. Once you plant a crop in its respective terrain, you turn the crank of your tiny pocket garden to pass time allowing your crop to grow. Some crops take one crank to grow to maturity while others may require more.
The crops you grow become currency to unlock and purchase more crops, which contributes to the expansion of your garden plots. Sometimes crops affect the terrain around it causing it to change, like planting a cactus. Planting a cactus generates desert terrain surrounding its planted position, which is terrain that can be used to grow different crops. However, if you plant a crop that causes the surrounding terrain to change, and there are already crops planting in those spots, the crops will begin to wilt and die.
The game mechanics are very straight forward as far as planting crops and what terrain is required for them to be planted. As you progress through the levels, you will find you will need to be creative in your strategy to produce certain terrains so crops can grow as you turn the crank to move forward their maturity. For example, you can add a fountain in your garden to produce a water-like terrain. In order to plant bell peppers you must have moist terrain. In order to achieve that you must plan out how to situate the fountain, the water terrain blocks and the cactuses that provide the desert terrain to create the moist terrain and keep it that way for two turns of the magic pocket garden crank. Adding a layered strategy element to the farming sim mechanics made Tiny Garden interesting and provided a decent challenge to creatively think outside the box.
The turning of the crank with the mouse can be very taxiing at times or be difficult for those with different ability needs. To adjust having to crank manually with a mouse, you can choose to move the crank with the keyboard space bar, which is a nice accessibility feature to have. As someone with carpal tunnel, this feature was very much appreciated after the first 40 minutes of manual turning of the magical pocket garden crank.
Outside of purchasing crops and tools, harvested crops can be used to purchase various decorations to customize the inside and outside of your magic pocket garden. I enjoyed seeing queer representation with the Intersex Progress Pride Flag which you can unlock and decorate the inside of the pocket garden with. I do wish that there were more flags available to customize the space with, such as the trans flag or asexual flag, to make our magical pocket garden specific to people’s identities and expression.
The nostalgia and creative strategic farming sim mechanics make Tiny Garden a breath of fresh air and variety for the cozy farming sim genre. While the game mechanics are simple, it provides enough challenge that makes a very fun and vibrant experience that many cozy gamers who love farming sims and strategy will find fun!
Tiny Garden is available today on Steam for $12.99 USD.
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