One of the few games I’ve been jealous of initially being a VR-exclusive title was Garden of the Sea. A cozy farming, crafting, settlement builder with a mystical story to uncover? Count me in! Delightfully developers Neat Corporation decided to create a non-vr standalone version of the game which I’ve spent plenty of hours playing and enjoying. It doesn’t do anything “new” but instead it is a fantastic melting pot of established ideas that you can explore at surface level or sink hours and hours into depending on your mood.
The story involves finding gems and activating deities that are scattered across neighbouring islands which sets up the mini world map for you to explore, but for the first hour or so you’ll be learning the ropes of Garden of the Sea on your home island. This introduces you to the main concept of the game – farming. You’ll hoe the ground to make a patch and then toss your flower, plant or crop seeds onto it. Give it a few waterings from your watering can and well and you’ll watch as each seed blossoms into its full version. Whilst that’s going on you can chop down trees and bushes with your axe which becomes wood for the crafting element of the game, but to get started you’ll need to invest in growing some crops which get your world up and running. This is because any home environment like your house, or a place to look after the various animals roaming your island, requires all different kinds of items to build them. You simply toss them into a building bubble and when it’s full of the required items, viola, your building is born.
Soon enough, you’ll need to start using more complex materials to build bigger and better structures and this is where the crafting table comes into play. Using the building bubble concept, you can toss objects into a machine, pull a lever and your item will be crafted. If you don’t want to burn through too much of something, you can combine it with a magical jar that gives you ten of something too – very handy for crops! Knowing what items to throw into the crafting machine requires collecting recipe pages that are scattered everywhere in the game. Keeping these tidy takes a bit of getting used to but a giant clipboard wall becomes available when you build a certain-sized house. Hurrah for no longer being a litterbug! If you choose to litter everywhere, the recipes you actively look at get saved in your journal but I did find the journal controls a little finickity at times to get to what I wanted. I’d have loved to be able to pin a recipe so I didn’t have to flick in and out of a journal to make sure I’d done it right.
Alongside crafting, there is a stove for cooking too. This is largely for cooking meals to gain affection from the various weird, squidgy and bouncy-looking animals across the game. Each animal has four tiers of affection and earning their trust and love unlocks various special items you can craft and build with. It is an optional challenge most of the time but a welcome one. The animals are quite fickle though. As Garden of the Sea moves through a sumptuous day/night cycle at a pace, the animals quickly forget about you and their affection drops quickly. Cue an awful lot of petting to get them back into cuddly territory again.
Garden of the Sea initially feels quite small and restrictive but as soon as you build the boat, the game opens its lungs, eyes and ears and lets you have almost free reign for the rest of the game. Sailing around between islands is a joy, with vibrant music and cute dolphin-like creatures splashing around you as you sail forward. Each island you move to has a diverse flora and fauna along with a unique style and design. I’m often reminded of plasticine and clay with the bold, vibrant colours and clean designs the game has. Whether its the garden hedge maze, the cloudy mountains or the fishing docks (oh there’s fishing here too), each world is small but distinctive like a mini world map to explore.
One of the best things about Garden of the Sea is that the main quest itself is direct and succinct but every system in the game has the option to pull you in for hours and hours of additional playtime if you like it. Want to craft flower bed boxes and lay paths to create your own garden? Do it. Want to decorate every part of any island with decorations and foliage? Knock yourself out. Fancy collecting every fish, or reaching top affection level with every animal you can domesticate? You can if you want, but the game doesn’t penalise you if you want to stay quest-focused. There is an entire colour dying system to add personal flair to objects but you barely touch it in the main quest. Yet if you love to personalise sandbox items in a world where you can craft everything exactly how you like it, Garden of Sea can jump from 5 hours to 50 hours. It is the perfect example of an expandable system design that goes as far as the players’ own investment does. Of course, that does mean you have the potential to miss mountains of the game content if you rush through but Garden of the Sea isn’t about rushing. This is a world asking to be lived in and I was delighted to be in it.
I did run into a couple of game freezes during my time playing the game but my biggest setback was that for some reason, Garden of the Sea made me motion sick. Funnily, this wasn’t when I was sailing on the boat! There was something about the gardening movements that just made me feel a bit unwell. It is therefore a testament to just how good the game is that I refused to park or drop it. I just had to limit my time in the game to short 15-minute bursts. It is why it has taken me so long to review it! The fact I still recommend it glowingly says a lot.
Garden of the Sea is cosy, relaxing, and as shallow or as deep as you want it to be. The various material, farming and crafting systems work beautifully together to make creating a world around you engaging and fun. There is little down time and as the game cuts the fat from the main quest and story route, you always feel like you are working towards a goal that’s just a few actions away. Beyond that, the level of total sandbox building is detailed and vast if you want to explore it. Garden of the Sea is a gem.
Review copy provided by the developer. PC version tested. Out on Steam.
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