Fresh vegetables, healthy fruits, and beautiful flowers — in Garden Simulator, you can take care of your allotment and harvest the crops. Cultivate your virtual garden, take care of the plants, then harvest and sell them. Oh, and it has garden gnomes! Lots of them.
Garden Simulator is a game for people with a green thumb. If you enjoy rooting in the soil, then Garden Simulator is the game for you! The central premise of Garden Simulator is to create the perfect garden. And let me tell you, I don’t have any green thumbs in real life or virtual ones. During my time with Garden Simulator, I also did some reconstruction work on my garden, putting new turf in my backyard. So when I played some Garden Simulator in the evening to unwind, my wife thought I went mental. I spent the entire day in the garden only to relax in a virtual garden.
Story & Gameplay
Garden Simulator is strung together through a series of narrative quests in which you unlock more of your garden and learn how to produce better crops and flowers. It has many quests and challenges to consider the confident choices you make in your garden. You start with overgrown grass and weeds, but with honest work and elbow grease, you can turn this into a blooming paradise of eggplants, peppers, flowers, and gnomes. The richer your yield, the more you can sell and the more money you can spend to enhance your piece of paradise. You gain access to unlockable features and additional content by completing certain aspects of the game. Most of it is designed to keep you interested in putting extra effort into certain plants or flowers, but this works out great from a gameplay perspective.
And the best part about it is that you can freely choose to plant a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and decorate your garden with a colorful array of flowers. When you start unlocking upgrades for the garden and gain access to building a terrace, it’s time to place your flowers and vegetable beds around the house and frame them with different fence elements. Hedges, furniture, and many other items in numerous designs will turn your piece of land into a unique vacation spot.
Another neat thing about Garden Simulator is that everything you do to keep your garden clean gives you money. Not only at the beginning will you find trash in your garden that needs to be removed, but also, during the game, your efforts to keep it clean will be rewarded! Mow your lawn, pick up weeds and other garbage, recycle it, and turn it into profit. The only weird thing is that my postman kept throwing my ordered stuff into my garden from the need of the road. All my packages ended up in my beautifully cultivated garden, but luckily Garden Simulator offers the option to build a package landing zone. Well, don’t we all need one of those…?
Controls & Visuals
Garden Simulator comes with some pretty realistic physics! Throw the design items around, place them as you like, build towers of fences or hedges, and do many crazy things you probably wouldn’t do in a “real” garden. There are almost no limits to your imagination. I tested the game in handheld and docked mode but couldn’t say I preferred one. Both play very fluidly, and the controls never bothered me during gameplay sessions. They feel natural and give pretty good control over what you do. My only complaint is that the lawnmower is pretty damn sharp since I mowed one of my eggplants with it (on accident).
The gardens I built looked great on the Nintendo Switch. The plants, flowers, gnomes, and other garden equipment are vibrantly colored and gave me some great ideas for my real-life garden. It’s one of those games that’s a great fit on the Nintendo Switch since you can take the garden with you anywhere without thinking about dragging your entire PC setup. And even though I usually prefer to play these games with a keyboard and mouse, the Nintendo Switch version proved me wrong. This works on a console.
Conclusion
So to conclude! Garden Simulator is an excellent fit on the Nintendo Switch and offers genuine fun. I’ll play this for a while since it worked wonders on my mental health. In addition, there is just something relaxing about working in a garden. And with that, I mean the virtual garden in Garden Simulator; I don’t enjoy the physical labor of a natural garden. So, if you like simulation games, gardening, gnomes, or any other aspect of growing your garden, Garden Simulator should be in your digital gaming shed. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m back to mowing my lawn.
