As a child of the nineties, I was always aware of miniature toys like Polly Pocket and the like. In fact my favourite cousin (shoutout to Joe, sorry to you other losers) had the ridiculous skull dungeon equivalent, which always impressed me greatly. The idea of a cool case that houses small toys to play with was frankly kind of genius, and captured the hearts of children worldwide. The developers of Tiny Garden also thought these toys were neat, because they made a farming game that takes place entirely inside one of these handheld delights.
There’s a backstory about how this bizarre antique farming toy was passed down from a family member, but for the most part you’ll be too busy thinking about plants to worry about this. How Tiny Garden works is pretty simple, you take seeds and plant them in the ground, then by turning the crank on the side of the garden toy they’ll grow into various crops. The actual act of cranking your garden to grow veggies is such a satisfying touch, and way better than having to wait for water and sun to do the work for you.
While the first few crops you plant will just happily grow wherever you place them, it won’t stay that simple for long. Some crops need sand to grow, so you’ll need to plant a cactus to generate sand around it. Lily pads only grow in water, so you’ll need to build a fountain to sprinkle the tiles before you sow those seeds. There are more complex combinations of surfaces too, like mud is made by combining sand and water. These mild puzzle elements are rather compelling, at least at first.
You see each seed pack you buy (more on that later) says what surface you need to plant it on, but nothing more than that. For the majority of plants this is fine, but some plants have more specific conditions needed to grow. It took me so long to realise that a greyed out vine needed to be planted on top of a tree, because nothing had combined that way before and the game didn’t tell me I needed to. I guess this adds an element of experimentation to the game, but that’s not particularly helpful when you don’t know about it.
There’s a reason you’re growing all these plants too, it’s not just because they look pretty. Once you’ve grown your first turnip you can harvest it, and in the seed menu you can trade it for a couple of carrot seeds. Once they’ve grown you’ll trade them for cactus seeds, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t take long for this to get much more complex though, with combinations of multiple plants needed to unlock exciting trees and healthy treats. It’s actually a really novel and enjoyable progression system for the most part, which carries across to the decorative items you can buy too.
While the bottom half of your magical flip toy is used exclusively for gardening, the top half is essentially a doll’s house. With your harvested crops you can buy all sorts of furniture and decorations to make it look pretty, with everything from progress pride flags (which I obviously bought first) to dining tables available to purchase and arrange. There’s no real incentive to do this, but it’s a nice cosy activity to distract from all the growing.
There are quite a few different cosy distractions on offer in Tiny Garden, just on case gardening isn’t relaxing enough for you. A lot of these are decorative, like how you can customise the colour of your toy garden, slap stickers on it (often of characters from other Super Rare Games) and even change the background of the game to various gorgeous sky scenes. There’s also a free play mode you unlock rather quickly, which allows you to place any plants and soft furnishings you want at no cost for a nice sandbox option.
There’s lots to love about Tiny Garden, but it also has some frustrating elements. For me the worst of these was how much more crops you needed to purchase later seeds. Because you need multiple harvested plants for this you’ll end up with multiple long chains of crops before you can get to unlocking the exciting grape that’s next on your list, and this gets very tedious and hard to keep track of. This makes the later portion of the game much less enjoyable than the early hours, which is a real shame.
Tiny Garden is a cosy gardening game with a seriously cool premise, which it’s easy to lose hours at a time playing. The light puzzle elements make sure it’s not at all brainless, and for those who like decorating there’s a lot of optional fun to be had. It does get frustrating unlocking later crops, but if you just lose yourself in the crop growing loop you’ll likely feel too relaxed to care.
