It’s Grape Season: "Garden Story" Review

By Teepu

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Player(s): 1

A charming game with some neat ideas meshed together, "Garden Story" may be a bit repetitive, but is still fun.

In Garden Story, you play as a grape named Concord who is tasked with being a guardian and ends up travelling around the ‘world’ to help get rid of the rot that is plaguing the various villages. The story isn’t particularly deep, but it does a solid job of keeping the player motivated to continue, which is good enough for what it sets out to do. The best part of the story isn’t even the narrative, but the names and puns that all revolve around fruits, vegetables, and gardening.

So how does the game actually play then? Pretty solid, if I’m being honest. The game is like a cross between A Link to the Past and Stardew Valley, with an emphasis on the former. The purpose of the game is to help create thriving villages by solving the residents’ problems and ridding the world of rot. You do this by walking around and completing various requests from the residents. As you complete these quests, you will level up one of three attributes for your village, which will in-turn result in further quests, more things to do and better gear to acquire. It is a gameplay loop that would work in a satisfying way if the Request Board’s quests weren’t so repetitive. By the time you reach the end of the main story in the second (of four) villages, you will notice a distinct pattern in what the requests will require of you: destroy rot in X location, deposit X item in a foraging box or interact with objects in X location (usually involving giving up some kind of item). This would not be so much of an issue if you only had to do this a couple times per village, but the further you go, the more you have to grind these requests to level up the attributes of the village. This is the only way to allow you to progress the main story and overstays its welcome quickly.

The main story, on the other hand, is reasonably varied in the tasks it requires. Sometimes you’ll fight bosses, look for something, or do a fetch quest. There isn’t anything particularly novel about the main quests, but they never feel like they overstay their welcome, and thus results in a main quest that never gets boring.

​You can equip up to four items to your hotbar, making it easy to switch between the different types of activities you will be doing. You’ll attack with a sword-like object, or fish with a rod or simply use a hammer to harvest materials. You also get to equip ‘memories’ which you unlock as you explore, that give your character various bonuses based on how you want to play. There is some minor variety in the strategy you’ll need to employ to combat the rot, but ultimately, you’ll simply be finding them and whacking them. You have a stamina bar for all your actions which forces you to responsibly manage how and when you do things, which makes things feel a lot more involved than it is. That’s not a bad thing though, it makes the game feel more engaging without taking away from the core experience.

Most objects you destroy will drop some kind of material you can use. These materials can be used to complete requests, or later in the game be used to build things around the world to help you complete tasks or use it to buy/upgrade your gear. This helps you feel like your character is constantly growing, which I really love about this game. The downside is that your inventory space is really limited, and every day you spend just doing normal tasks you will fill your bag very quickly. In a game like Resident Evil, I can forgive small inventory space which forces strategic survival. In a game like this it’s entirely out of place and gets irritating very fast. You can always trek to one of the many storage boxes to drop stuff off as you’re doing tasks, or just build one where it’s allowed, but this is only a Band-Aid for the real problem bogging down the flow of the game. On the bright side, the game looks and sounds great. The animations are smooth, the music is catchy, and the sound effects are never grating. The environments are fun and varied too.

Garden Story is a solid venture, if you are looking for a Zelda-style game with some strategy mechanics trickled in. It suffers from bogged down gameplay because of its limited inventory space and very repetitive grindy quests, but it is a fun game all the same.

For More Info On "Garden Story":
​https://www.gardenstorygame.com/

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Gameplay: B-
Graphics: A-
Sound: A-
Value: C+

OVERALL:  B

Pros:
+ Cute world and characters make for a charming aesthetic experience.
+ There is always something to buy or upgrade, making you feel a steady character progression.
+ The main story quests are fun and varied,

Cons:
- The side-quests are immensely repetitive and often require some grinding to unlock the next story quest.
- Limited inventory space can cause for some frustrating back and forth travel,
- Building mechanic felt underutilized.

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Disclaimer: This game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.