Tiny Garden Review - Put a Cute Farming Sim in Your Pocket
In many ways, Tiny Garden is exactly what you’d expect from a farming sim: you grow crops and other plants and use the profits to customise your garden and adjoining home. What sets this game apart is that the garden exists within a tiny magical toy reminiscent of the Polly Pocket trend of the 1990s.
‘Toy’ is an appropriate word to describe this game. Although you are guided through Tiny Garden with unlockables and small puzzles, overall the experience is open-ended and playful. Experimentation is encouraged—or, honestly, necessary—as you try to reach your goals with minimal instructions. There is enough freedom to be reminiscent of sitting down with a dollhouse as a child and getting lost in your imagination for the right audience, although the game’s simplicity and lack of guidance won’t suit everyone.
Although this game is suited to players who like to experiment, its gameplay might also appeal to farming sim strategists. I spent most of my playthrough talking to myself, saying things like, ‘Okay, so I want to unlock those seeds, so I need that crop, but to get that I will need this tool, which requires…’ Learning the chain of events that would unlock each new seed, item, or set of customisables led to a satisfying hit of dopamine with each task successfully scratched off my to-do list. I found optimising the garden so I could maintain most terrain types at the same time and harvest my crops as effectively as possible to be a satisfying—though optional—puzzle.
then all of the customisables, and finally I dug into the decorating systems. Somebody else might take more breaks throughout the game to unlock colours, stickers, and furniture to make their toy feel more like their own. Tiny Garden encourages people to play their own way, whether that be as a min-maxing tactician, a relaxed decorator, or somewhere inbetween.
Throughout the game, you can also find letters from the toy’s previous owners, reminding you that the clamshell is an object within a game—perhaps not the game itself. Objects have memories and stories of their own, and although the letters are auxiliary to the main game loop of ‘plant seeds, harvest crops, get more seeds’, I enjoyed the added character they gave to the experience.
Overall, Tiny Garden is a relatively short game but it’s well-made and packed with personality, like a tiny Polly Pocket toy that you can put in your pocket and play with when you have a spare moment to explore an imaginary world.
Tiny Garden was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
