Tiny Garden

Polly Pocket was one of my favorite toys when I was a kid. With a child’s boundless imagination, I spent countless hours lost in the whimsical worlds I created in my mind through that tiny, magical playset. Tiny Garden captures this concept and shapes it into a farming puzzle. What results is a miniature garden game inside a box of wonders, brimming with charm and nostalgia for those of us who remember the magic of this little playtoy.

Tiny Garden’s core mechanic revolves around planting seeds and harvesting them to buy other types of seeds or tools. The seeds also serve as a currency for acquiring furniture items that you can use to decorate the three-floor “house” that the inner cover of the box harbors. The environment (background) and the plant or furniture colors can also be changed by buying different color variants using seeds. Additionally, seeds can be used to acquire stickers that can be applied on the outside of the toy box.

The puzzle element of Tiny Garden lies in the way the crops are arranged and how they influence each other. Each seed has a specific terrain type that it can be planted on, which is created by having other seeds in its proximity or by using specific tools to create it. For instance, a raspberry bush will produce lush terrain around it, which will allow planting of roses, sunflowers and other things. Hot peppers leave a burnt patch of soil after they’re harvested, enabling the growing of volcanic plants. Mushrooms under trees multiply with each turn, quickly filling up your garden grid. Fountains create water pools, allowing lotuses or lilies to grow. Or, if these wet tiles are further combined with the arid terrain produced around a cactus, the resulting soil can grow potatoes. These are just a few of the mechanics you’ll get to learn and master while playing the game.

One of the things I liked a lot about Tiny Garden is that you can control the growth of the crops. It’s not an idle game, but a turn-based game. Rotating the crank placed on the side of the toy advances the turn to the next stage of the crops’ growth. Seeds become ripe plants really fast, usually taking only one or two crank rotations. They don’t ever wither as long as there are no surrounding factors to influence that, thus you can leave them planted for an indefinite amount of time. You can even move a newly planted seed to another spot as long as you don’t advance to the next turn.

The early hours of gameplay, during which only one or two categories of seeds are unlocked, are genuinely enjoyable. However, as the player progresses and unlocks additional categories, the production chain becomes increasingly complex and tedious to manage. For instance, acquiring seed A requires having crops B and C in storage. But to obtain those crops, you must first acquire and plant seeds B and C on suitable terrain, then harvest them. This process may also involve using additional seeds or tools and arranging everything in specific configurations on a grid that, even when fully unlocked, offers a maximum of just 32 tiles. Furthermore, purchasing a single B or C seed also requires harvesting one to three other crops beforehand, and so on. As you can imagine, even at a depth of just three steps, reaching your target crop becomes a challenge. Extend that process to six or seven stages, and it becomes rather overwhelming.

Without a system to track this production chain or at the minimum, a visual representation of the entire seed tree together with the required terrains, one needs to manually retrace the dependencies for each seed. This means starting from the root of the tree (your target crop) and working your way down, one level at a time, for each seed in this tree structure. The game does help a little by automatically jumping to a seed’s category page when you click on it, but there’s no way to see which crops that seed contributes to. In the end, by the time you’ve gathered the ingredients for half the chain, you might have already forgotten what you were even trying to produce.

Despite its flaws, I got sucked into it for hours, always telling myself that I would stop after the next turn only to see that several more hours had passed. First, I set my goal to discover all the seeds. Then I wanted to get all the tools. Then I wanted to buy some decorations. Eventually, I ended up unlocking everything. The game has a way of getting you addicted and almost every decoration or seed you unlock is a mini-quest on its own. Additionally, there are small puzzles to solve that require you to create a certain configuration of crops by mixing terrains and making efficient use of tools. Several more of these puzzles are offered through Steam achievements, such as using a windmill to scatter dandelion seeds or setting fire to a eucalyptus tree, both of which require a bit of planning in regards to the terrain placement and what plants to grow beforehand to obtain that type of terrain.

Tiny Garden’s gameplay is fun and addictive, though it starts to feel a bit grindy towards mid and late-game. However, it’s not the kind of game you are expected to finish in just a couple of hours. Instead, it’s likely to keep you hooked for much longer. For me, it took around twenty hours to unlock all the achievements.