The Garden Path Review (PC) – Keep Calm and Carrot On

I have been a part of the Finger Guns team for a while now, I think we have now reached the three year mark. Slack opened a whole new world for me, as did reviewing and writing games that I love, hate, play, can’t put down and can’t wait to put down. At that time, three years ago, The Garden Path was in very early development on Kickstarter. It was something that immediately took my fancy. Ever since, I have kept tabs on its wondrous evolution and development. Well kids, you know the saying: don’t meet your heroes? Yeah…

The Garden Path is a slice of life gardening sim that allows players to take things slow, enjoy the landscape and get your green fingers ready. One interesting element is the game encourages you to play it in small chunks, as if you were pottering around your own garden. The Garden Path is in real time, and four seasons will take place over a real 28 day period. If you sign on at 5pm, it’ll be 5pm in your garden. The game mostly encourages the idea that this is a place of Zen to do what you like, take in the scenery and enjoy the friendships you may meet along the way. 

Find Your Inner Peas

Let’s start with the positives: this game is beautiful. The hand drawn aesthetic invites a cosy, welcoming and charming vibe to the game. It reminds me of storybooks from when I was a child, twenty-something years ago (coughs loudly). Everything from the grass blades, to the delectable anthropomorphic vegetable friends you meet, you can clearly see there has been love put into the design and art style of The Garden Path throughout. The dedication to gardening and the love of green fingers alike is apparent from the very beginning. The variety of plants, flora, seeds etc that you will experience the joy of growing. I imagine those who are a fan of the hobby will be able to experience similar levels of satisfaction because of the real time element. 

Secondly, let’s talk about its place in the genre. It’s far from the average farming/gardening sim. Many gardening/farming sims have taken on this larger than life approach of doing many tasks very quickly. Organising your garden, having the same backstory of inheriting this named piece of land from your grandparents. The Garden Path quite literally walks down a very different path than those in the genre. In the past, real time games have really only lived on Facebook Apps, such as Farmville, Candy Crush, and any other idle click games.

It’s not to say that there are not many out there on PC and desktop, but we have to be honest it is rare that games will use your time zone to change weather or day/night cycles and that adds an interesting element to the game. I tried to make a concerted effort to log on in different periods of the time to see the subtle changes The Garden Path offers. From sunset, or lunch time, or broad daylight. The changes are visual, the environment does have a different feel and visitors to your garden will vary. I signed on one lunch time and nearly everyone was there, compared with a few humble visitors at sunset. 

I’m Rooting For You

The characters are charming, as mentioned most are anthropomorphic vegetables wandering around your garden, but some may be commonly found creatures such as frogs. These characters all have different names, personalities and looks. You can trade seeds and plants for various different things depending on what you need. Some characters will sell clothes, seeds, bugs or tea to name a few. I am yet to come across vegetable seeds… other than carrot, so I can neither confirm or deny if these vegetable friends are selling seeds of themselves? But I don’t think it’s that kind of garden. 

Fishing can be very boring in games now, so each title is looking for a new way to change it up, make it interesting and entertaining. I will say The Garden Path developers have come up with probably one of the most unique ways I have seen in a long time. When throwing out your line, you are introduced to a quadrant on your screen, lullaby type music will play and it is your job to keep your cursor in the correct quadrant as an aimed circle gets smaller and smaller. If you manage to keep your cursor in the centre of the circle and the correct quadrant you are able to reel in your fish. It is quick, relatively simple, and it gets the job done. 

Your inventory will not disappoint (nothing worse than having any type of sim game with an iddy-biddy inventory to start with for ‘motivation’ to upgrade it). Whilst there are opportunities to get bigger backpacks, the one you start with is plenty and will hold seeds, flora, flowers, tea, any items or furniture you wish to carry and much more. You will likely not have to think about its capacity for a good while, which is a big win for these types of games. 

Food for Thought

Whilst this game was much anticipated on my to-play hitlist for many years, I can’t shake the pang of disappointment that runs through my mind. The game almost leaves you at the mercy of its demand to play in short bursts. What do you mean you want to play MORE? Well tough, you don’t massively have a choice, because the game will purposely give you tasks that depend on RNG variables such as the right visitor, or the right patch of land to dig up. As a result, this game is quite difficult to actually review. The real world time changes mean nothing is going to grow to a satisfactory level. It literally mimics a garden. Sunflowers take a few days to sprout? AMAZING, see you then. All plants, flora and trees are reflections of their real world equivalents. Once planted, that’s it pal. Watch some paint dry, it will be the same thing. 

There is a part of me that wants to progress, and wants to continue playing longer than the game has allotted me. I have tasks that I am desperate to do to move forward in the story just slightly. Whilst there isn’t massively a narrative to The Garden Path there are still relationships you can make, and a Garden to make your own. I appreciate that actually there will be an audience for The Garden Path, specifically for those who maybe need a game they can dip in and out of.

I know for one, I do occasionally need that kind of game in the background to just mindlessly dip in and out of. However I think The Garden Path has taken the choice value away. Once I played any more than twenty minutes I found myself only being able to really walk around. Like I had hit my very own ‘invisible wall of progress’. Yet I yearned to play more. I wanted to explore more, I wanted to progress on tasks, I wanted to plant more things, discover more things but I was at the mercy of the ‘short burst formula’.

Don’t get me wrong, I attempted to rebel and wait it out in the garden and whilst that’s great for the first few days of discovering the land, the land is exactly the same each day, with minor subtle changes. Like I said, I have tasks from the first or second time I jumped in that tell me the next stage to finishing this task is to talk to to visitors. I have met every single visitor now, and no matter how many days I jump in and talk to everyone, no-one is mentioning this specific task. Equally, the visitor you may wish to speak to, isn’t always there and therefore you need to cross your fingers and toes they come visit later or the next day. 

I guess this invites reflection on what CarrotCake may be trying to do here. With gaming addiction and hours long streaming absolutely rife, is CarrotCake trying to be one of the good guys? To encourage that gaming doesn’t need to be hours and hours of time spent to enjoy the game. Trying to perhaps make the point that delayed gratification can be satisfying if you just stick at it long enough to re-train the brain and match our very short attention spans that we all have now thanks to Vine, TikTok, YouTube Shorts ect. I dunno! but it certainly crossed my mind when trying to zoom out of what was really going on here.

Oh, For Beets Sake

Tasks are ‘ticked’ off by a beautiful constellation that keeps track of all your different milestones within the game. The brighter the star, the more you have achieved that milestone. The milestones encompass everything you can do in the game, from running errands, meeting visitors of the garden, harvesting and planting. It will be kept track of up there. I think this was a creative way to incorporate game progression into a very sandbox-like game. 

I also believe that the control system is perhaps much more complex than it needs to be. You can walk around, but to really interact with anything you have to ‘explore it’ by pressing a button, and THEN press another button to action whatever you wanted to do such as eat/plant/dig. I wonder if this function is to add length to the time spent in the gardening but really it was just shortening my last nerve. The opportunity to stumble upon flora and cut, harvest, or do anything with it isn’t an option unless you explore it first. Whilst an advantage is you can then be really intentful about your time in the garden, the disadvantage is that you could miss lots of subtle extra’s such as holes to dig, pieces of paper to be found, knocking on wood to find a safe box etc. 

I will caveat this paragraph with the acknowledgement that every day I signed on, there was a new update to the game. It is still a few days before release, and therefore these issues may be patched out before others get their hands dirty in the soil. However, I did unfortunately run into some bugs and difficulties that would subsequently crash my game. I experienced a crash while burrowing through a mole hole (these look as if they are placed at random and I later found out they drop you somewhere else on the map acting similarly to a fast travel system, without the choice of where you fast travel too). There were times where I fell under the map too, as well as some odd smaller crashes where I was unable to interact with some items. Restarting did resolve all of these crashes and I was pleased to realise no progress was lost due to a consistent autosave feature. 

Overall, The Garden Path is impressive in places, and dips slightly in others. Its dedication to the hobby, the incorporation of real-time mechanics, and the art style, is something to behold. For me, the element of choice and the pace lets it down slightly as you become at the mercy of some of the things that make it great. It means that your desire to play and enjoy the game at your own pace is somewhat shunted by the encouragement to play in small bursts and have new events happen each day. However, there will be an audience out there where this is just perfect for them to fit in busy lives and exactly what they need / want from a game of this genre. 

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The Garden Path is a slice of life gardening sim that allows players sit back and enjoy the view. Whilst the art style, real time mechanics and dedication to the craft feel impressive to experience, the stop-start pace can hinder your enjoyment in its tracks. The Garden Path is perfect for anyone who needs a low commitment experience of the simulation genre, but perhaps not for those who want to get lost for hours.

The Garden Path is available July 30th on PC via Steam (review platform) and Nintendo Switch.

Developer: Carrotcake
Publisher: Mooncat Games

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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