Verde is a garden-themed city builder that puts the focus firmly on the city’s aesthetics rather than on the economy. Your city is home to cute critters called Seedlets, and they’ll bumble around their daily routines, chatting to others, visiting the market, eating ice cream, and chilling at the local fountain. You, as the city builder of this tiny city, need to make sure the Seedlets are happy, but there is no real fail state for forgetting to do so.
There are only a few things players need to consider in this grid-based city. Leaves are your currency, and there will always be leaves falling. How many leaves is up to how happy and large your population is, but this means you can never lose. Everything is powered by water. Placing down a water pump will water a radius around it, allowing for up to 8 buildings requiring water to be connected to it. Need more? Put another pump down. Seedlets require water, social, goods, decorations, and nutrients to be happy. These are fairly easy stats to reach, as each building has a radius of impact, and there are overlays for each stat to tell you which parts of your city are lacking in a certain trait. If you stay on that path, you’ll win the game!
In story mode, you’ll be tasked with placing certain buildings and raising the happiness and population over certain thresholds. Placing the right building within the radius of what you need to improve is how to win with Verde. There is so much room to play with that you can be quite creative with your city, and indeed there is a creative mode that lets you build whatever you like. Placing decorations like benches, flowers, trees, statues and so on really sells the garden theme. Most buildings come with multiple designs of their walls, roof, and door, and you can save presets to create streets with certain styles. I found this useful because Verde also has three biomes within your city. The beach requires fans to be placed to cool Seedlets down. The snow region requires heaters and power generators to heat Seedlets up. Again, there is plenty of room to work with, and by this point your population will be large and happy, so you can rake in the leaves and spend away.
Everything in Verde is simple and easy to pick up, use, move, replicate, and toggle. I appreciated the frictionless design and cosy vibes. If you don’t take into account being efficient, you’ll still earn leaves and be able to buy things, but it’ll just take longer. Sometimes, you may need to wait a minute or two to get a hefty bank balance to buy some expensive buildings, but when that was the case, I’d watch the cute Seedlets wander around. I was reminded of the similarly cute Gourdlets and ended up leaving the game running like a screensaver for 5-10 minutes, then coming back to make multiple purchases. In fact, the game was so gentile, that at times it felt more like a creative sandbox, and closer in complexity to bottom-of-the-screen games. I’d rate Verde above almost all of those, though, just because of how much room you have to play with and all the different decorations on offer.
Gentle, cosy, unpressured, and quaint. Verde eschews complexity for relaxation, and pulls it off. There is plenty to do for the price point. The story mode will take 5-6 hours to complete, whereas creative mode has as much steam in it as your creative brain wants to engage with it. You’ll be able to make something beautiful and cutesy in no time at all. Fun and an approachable city builder for younger gamers, too.
A review copy of Verde was provided by the publisher. Verde is out on PC.
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