This article was originally published as a review in progress, without points. Having now experienced all four seasons of the year in the game, we have updated the text and assigned a score.
Anyone who has tried to cultivate a garden knows that it is hard work. You can’t just plant flowers, water them once a week and leave it at that. Each individual flower, plant and tree requires a different level of care; seasons and weather affect plant growth, and some cannot survive certain seasons. But, as the English poet Albert Austin wrote in his book The garden I love, “Glory of gardening: hands in the soil, head in the sun, heart with nature. Cultivating a garden means nourishing not only the body, but also the soul.”
carrotcake’s debut game, The Garden Path, fits this mantra perfectly. Independent developer and artist Louis Durrant started working on this passion project over seven years ago; after planting the seeds for this completely different simulation slice of life, he went out of his way to carefully care for and nurture every single aspect of the game. From art to mechanics to vibeThe Garden Path is the most accurate representation of gardening in a video game, and it is both the game’s greatest strength and greatest weakness.
The Garden Path answers the age-old question, “What if Animal Crossing stopped to smell the roses every now and then?” Using shades of Nintendo’s life sim and feel Moomin comics, The Garden Path feels like a quirky British children’s book from the 80s with beautiful watercolours, amusing inhabitants and travelers with vegetables for heads and a love of tea.
The game appropriately begins in the spring; every day in the garden is monitored by your Switch’s internal clock, the season lasts one week, and the year lasts 28 days. On the first day, your character arrives in a large garden, overgrown with overgrown plants, 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 thermos full of tea and the torn page that brought you to the garden.
We picked up one half of a broken pair of shears, spoke to the statue, and set off with the grass and leaves crunching under our shoes. Along the way, we cut down the odd tree, gathering materials and not paying attention to what you should make. After checking the map, we found three visitors hanging around the garden: Augusts, the bear scout, helped us fix our broken tool; Lars, a comfortable strongman, taught us to fish; and Thom, our fellow gardener, gave us a little hint about our torn page.
The Garden Path wants you to do your own thing and go at your own pace; there’s a short tutorial that teaches you how to focus—allowing you to choose a plant to harvest and study—but the game literally throws you into the weeds. Some glowing glitches will appear to suggest which direction to go, but often they blend in with the beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and we didn’t spot them until the fourth day of play. In fact, during our first few days of playing, instead of embracing the carefree and gentle nature of the game, we felt more than a little overwhelmed, especially being rewarded with twigs and weeds for tending to the garden or when trying to read in-game instructions.
For example, tones are vital for harvesting useful items, but we stumbled upon them by accident. Certain tasks will reward you with tones, and everything you can harvest is affected by the tones you have. You’re more likely to pick some parsley if you have a certain type of tone, for example. You can even temporarily increase the tones by cooking and drinking tea. Even your body temperature affects the tones you can wear or collect. The idea behind the mechanics is nice and we are sure that the discovery should pleasantly surprise us, but instead, we wish we had known about it earlier so that a bunch of branches and weeds wouldn’t burden our backpack.
Fortunately, your garden will attract visitors every day, some of whom will want to take these things off your hands. Each item is assigned a different value, such as ‘unusual’, ‘rustic’ or ‘vintage’, which comes into play when trading for new tools, seeds, clothing and decorative items. Animal traders, for example, may have a wooden fence to barter but want something of ‘rustic’ value in return. Like many things in The Garden Path, getting items with these specific values can take a while, but luckily the merchants will always return to the garden, and you’ll always know if they’re visiting because the game tells 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 live in the garden permanently. All these characters are beautifully drawn and utterly charming, fitting perfectly into the strange, magical world of the garden. These vegetable-like people will stay if you fulfill special requirements for them, such as growing certain types of trees or placing ‘cool’ furniture. And, once you’ve convinced them to stay, they’ll ask you to perform simple little tasks like gathering ginger root for them.
It will take time to get these residents to stay – sometimes, a lot of time. Planting seeds and trees is not an overnight process and depends on factors such as soil quality and fertilizer. The Garden Path wants you to know what each plant loves intimately, while never punishing you for it not knowing, things definitely go slower if you don’t know. It’s suitable for the sleepy tone of the game, but if you’re used to the hustle and bustle of games like Animal Crossing, where you always have to work somethingit’s a bit of a culture shock.
On the Switch, that steady pace of life can unfortunately seem icy thanks to a number of in-game issues. We were alerted to a few bugs before diving into the game, but there are various issues with controls and load times that hurt The Garden Path’s meticulous gameplay. To dig a hole, you have to hold ‘Y’ to focus and then press ‘X’ on an empty piece of grass, which means we’d have to turn our thumb over our finger. When we focused on a group of plants at once, if we wanted to check the progress of our research, we had to completely exit the research popup and refocus on the plants. The fishing minigame also suffers from input lag and poorly explained mechanics. There are also load times and lags for almost everything – from loading the game, opening the backpack, and even viewing the map.
We also experienced a few bugs that prevented us from doing certain things. Sometimes the map won’t let us place markers or even scroll to find out who is visiting the garden – this has since been patched, but the map sometimes moves very slowly. Occasionally we couldn’t use a shovel or fishing rod for no apparent reason. We even experienced 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 before diving into it. As such, the game feels incredibly niche and requires a specific type of player. There are ways to speed up certain things — lollipop sticks are given as a reward and you can use them to get free fruits to harvest, and if you manage to catch a fish, playing them sends out a song that can change the time of day or spawn a certain plant. But regardless of these small conveniences, as we got through most of the year, we realized that there was no real variety, except for a few new plants that grow each season. Until winter, we were still doing the same five or ten activities every day, while slowly working towards the same goals.
It’s clear that a lot of love has gone into The Garden Path, and with constant updates to improve the gameplay, carrotcake is determined to make the experience weed-free. But getting anything out of the game depends on how much love and dedication you have to pour into it – and even then, the Switch version might not be the best place to do it.
