This article was originally published as an ungraded, in-progress review. After experiencing all four seasons of a year in the game, we’ve updated the text and grading.
Anyone who has ever tried to grow a garden knows it is hard work. You can’t just plant a bunch of flowers, water them once a week, and leave them alone. Each flower, plant, and tree requires a different level of care; the seasons and weather affect how plants grow, and some simply won’t survive certain seasons. But, as the English poet Albert Austin wrote in his book The garden that I love, “The glory of gardening: hands in the soil, head in the sun, heart with nature. To cultivate a garden is not only to cultivate the body but also to cultivate the soul.”
carrotcake’s debut game, Garden Pathfits this mantra. Developer and solo artist Louis Durrant began working on this passion project over seven years ago; having planted the seeds for this radically different slice-of-life simulation, he has worked to meticulously nurture and care for every aspect of the game. From the art to the mechanics to the vibrateGarden Path is the most accurate depiction of gardening in a video game, and this is both the game’s greatest strength and weakness.
The Garden Path answers the eternal question: “What if Animal crossing Stop to smell the roses every once in a while?” Using the nuances of Nintendo’s life simulation games and the feel of Mum The Garden Path resembles a quirky British children’s book from the 80s with its gorgeous watercolour illustrations, delighting residents and visitors with its vegetable garden, and love of tea.
The game starts in spring; each day in the garden is dictated by your Switch’s internal clock, with a season lasting a week and a year lasting 28 days. On the first day, your character arrives at a large, heavily wooded garden, though it’s more like a small forest with rivers winding through the trees and foliage shading the entire landscape. All you have with you is an axe, a pot of tea, and a torn page, which is what leads you to the garden.
We picked up a broken pair of pruning shears, talked to a statue, and set off with grass and leaves crunching under our shoes. We chopped down a few trees along the way, picked up supplies, and didn’t care what we did. should Checking the map, we discovered three visitors hanging around the garden: Augusts, the local bear ranger, helped fix our broken tools; Lars, the cute yak, taught us how to fish; and Thom, a gardening enthusiast, gave us a little hint about our torn page.
Garden Path wants you to do things for yourself and go at your own pace; there’s a short tutorial that teaches you how to focus – letting you choose a plant to harvest and research – but the game literally throws you into the weeds. A few glowing bugs will appear to give you directions, but they often blend into the gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds and we didn’t notice them until our fourth day of play. In fact, for the first few days of playing, rather than enjoying the carefree and gentle nature of the game, we felt a little overwhelmed, especially when we were rewarded with branches and weeds for tending the garden or when we tried to read the in-game instructions.
For example, Tones are important for collecting useful items, but we stumbled upon them by accident. Certain quests will reward you with Tones, and everything you can collect is affected by the Tones you have. For example, you’re more likely to collect some parsley if you have a certain Tone. You can even temporarily increase your Tones by brewing and drinking tea. Even your body temperature affects the Tones you can have on or collect. The idea behind this mechanic is great, and we’re sure that discovering it will come as a pleasant surprise, but instead, we wish we’d known about it sooner so we wouldn’t have to add a bunch of twigs and weeds to our backpack.
Luckily, your garden will attract visitors every day, some of whom will want to take things from you. Each item has different values assigned to it, such as ‘unusual’, ‘rustic’ or ‘vintage’, which come into play when trading for new tools, seeds, clothes and decorations. For example, animal traders may have wooden fences to trade, but they want something with a ‘rustic’ value in return. Like many things in The Garden Path, acquiring items with these specific values can take time, but luckily, traders will always return to the garden and you’ll always know whether they’ve visited or not because the game will tell you (and you can check the map).
Animals aren’t the only visitors you’ll encounter, and just like in Animal Crossing, you can invite people to come live permanently in the garden. All of these characters are beautifully drawn and incredibly charming, fitting perfectly into the garden’s strange, magical world. These plant-like people will stay if you fulfill specific requests for them, like planting certain plants or placing ‘shiny’ furniture. And, once you convince them to stay, they’ll ask you to do simple little tasks like collecting ginger roots for them.
Keeping these residents around takes time – sometimes a lot of time. Growing seeds and plants isn’t an overnight process and depends on factors like soil quality and fertilizer. The Garden Path wants you to know what each plant likes, and while it never punishes you for Are not Knowing that, things will definitely slow down if you don’t. It fits the sleepy tone of the game, but if you’re used to the hustle and bustle of games like Animal Crossing, where you’re always doing somethingThis is really a culture shock.
On Switch, that steady slice-of-life pacing can unfortunately be slowed down by a number of in-game issues. We were aware of a few bugs before diving into the game, but there are a variety of control issues and loading times that take a toll on The Garden Path’s meticulous progression. To dig a hole, you have to hold ‘Y’ to focus, then press ‘X’ on an empty patch of grass, which meant we had to rotate our thumbs around. When focusing on a group of plants at once, if we wanted to check our research progress, we had to completely exit the research pop-up and refocus on the plants. The fishing mini-game also suffers from input lag and vaguely explained mechanics. There are also loading times and lag for almost everything – from starting the game, opening our backpack, and even viewing the map.
We also encountered a few bugs that prevented us from doing certain things. Sometimes the map wouldn’t let us place markers or even scroll through to find out who was visiting the garden – this has since been patched, but sometimes the map scrolled very slowly. Occasionally, we couldn’t use the shovel or fishing rod for no apparent reason. We even had a crash or two when opening the menu.
Garden Path’s meditative pace is perfect for the game it’s trying to be, but you need to be aware of that before you jump in. As a result, the game feels extremely niche and demands a specific type of player. There are ways to speed up certain things—lollipop sticks are given as rewards and you can use them to harvest for free, and if you actually catch a fish, releasing them will play a song that can change the time of day or create certain types of plants. But despite these little conveniences, as we progressed through most of the year, we realized there wasn’t any real variety, aside from a few new plants popping up each season. By winter, we were still doing the same five or ten activities every day, still slowly working toward the same goal.
It’s clear that a lot of love has gone into The Garden Path, and with constant updates to help improve the flow of the game, Carrotcake is determined to make this experience weed-free. But getting anything out of the game depends on whether you have the love and dedication to give it back – and even then, the Switch version might not be the best place to do it.
