Garden Story Review (bolte)
Garden Story ]
Garden Story is a lightweight, hack 'n' slash adventure that's fun and well paced. While some elements feel unfinished and glommed on (gardening and crafting), they don't impact the core gameplay.
The tag of 'cozy' is disputable. Yes, our protagonist is a cute little grape, the pixel art is lovely, most of the townsfolk are friendly, and interpersonal conflicts tend to get resolved in 80's sitcom fashion ('We were both wrong and I'm sorry'), but this is not 'Stardew Valley,' except for perhaps the mines, where the solution to problems is good old fashioned violence. There's no relationship-building (with perhaps one exception there aren't even any families), gardening is optional unless you're short on a particular inventory item, you don't have a home so much as a series of hotel rooms, and crafting is minimal.
One curious design decision is the lack of gendered pronouns; Concord the grape is a 'they,' not a 'he'; Mandy the guardian is a 'they', not a 'she,' and so on. On the one hand, this causes some clunky, confusing dialogue and makes it that much harder to 'connect' with characters who are, after all, anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables (and frogs). On the other hand, the game's narrative is clear that we are playing in a broken, decaying world being overrun with 'the rot.' The absence of gender effectively reinforces the world's sterility, drought, and, ironically, literal fruitlessness. 'Fruitlessness', in fact, is the heart of the opening scene.
As the game is only saved when you go to bed for the night, dying is a waste of time and re-doing everything is not fun; I don't recommend it. Use the option to set dying to 'off.' As it was, I only died twice. Once in the first boss battle because I was unprepared and woefully unbuffed, and second in the final battle because by this point I was a cocky, overpowered grape half-drunk on leafy dew.
Boss battles require lightweight bullet-hell-type tactics: evade enemies and attacks until the boss becomes vulnerable and you can start pounding.
The 'hot-bar' design for weapon-switching is fantastic and needs to be more widely adopted by similar games where rapid weapon-switching is important. PSA: If you are currently a game developer and force your players to repeatedly stumble around an inventory screen mid-battle to swap the 'sword' for a 'boomerang' and back again, please adopt the hot-bar or quit your job.
As far as disposable amusements go, Garden Story is quite pleasant.