This could've been an okay game. It really could. I don’t think it ever tried to be great, and honestly, that’s fine. Not every game needs to be some grand, genre-defining masterpiece. But the thing is, there are just so many little annoyances piled up here that the whole thing ends up falling apart. By the time I reached the end, I just... I don’t think I can recommend it to anyone.

The story? Eh, it’s alright. Doesn’t blow your mind, doesn’t do anything particularly clever, but it’s serviceable. It exists. For a short game, I guess that’s enough.

Art style’s decent, but some of those tilesets are rough, and paired with bad collision detection, walking around isn’t great.

The soundtrack is kinda cute, actually. I found myself humming it here and there. It’s not something I’d go listen to on its own, but it does the job. It’s fine.

But the controls. Oh god, the controls. Why do they feel like this? Once you start attacking in one direction, that’s it. You’re locked in. You can’t change your mind, can’t adjust mid-swing. It’s clunky, stiff, and just plain frustrating. It constantly got in the way of what could’ve been a decent combat system.

Then there’s the stamina system. The early game is just painful. You run out of stamina constantly, and it’s not like it makes things more strategic or interesting. It just slows everything down and makes you sigh a lot. Then, at the end of the game, you have so much stamina you basically stop thinking about it. It’s like they realized the system sucked and just gave up on balancing it halfway through.

Also, the game makes you change weapons all the time to deal with different enemies, which is fine in theory, but the only way to do it is by opening your inventory and manually selecting a new one. There’s no quick-swap. No hotkey. Nothing. It’s one of those small quality-of-life things that would’ve made a HUGE difference, but nope. Not here.

And then there’s the dungeon grinding. This one really got to me. You need specific materials to progress, which are locked to certain dungeons. Cool, that’s normal. But every time you re-enter a dungeon to grind, you have to redo all the same damn puzzles. Again. And again. And again. They’re not even good puzzles! It’s just lazy little box-pushing stuff that you can solve without thinking, or time-based fishing rod throws. Although, given that combat is awful, I’m not sure that replacing this with mob arenas would have made things any better.

Inventory management is another pointless chore. Things don’t stack in your inventory, your bag fills up constantly, and you’re either running back to storage or dropping garbage manually, which you will be forced to often. Half the time you’ll pick up the wrong thing because it was sitting on top of something you actually wanted. It’s just busywork that adds nothing to the game.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the game throws in this seed pouch thing near the end, which is both useless and annoying. You plant stuff, wait a couple days, then maybe upgrade your weapon. It adds nothing. By that point, I was already fed up, and this was just more fluff I had to deal with. Oh yeah, and you can’t simply skip days because "Concord isn’t tired yet"!

So yeah. I think there might have been a decent little game buried under all of this. They just needed to iron out the combat and get rid of systems that get in your way. It was never going to be great, but it could have been good. As it stands, it’s just a mid game, and again, I wouldn’t recommend it.

This is a cozy little zelda-lite game. I enjoyed my time with it. It's a bit simple, but it doesn't overstay it's welcome. Pick this up for a bite-sized adventure.

a foolproof formula of action-adventure RPG with cute graphics, an amazing story and a good soundtrack. its pacing, difficulty, pricing, and length are perfect. i'm always on the lookout for games like this, and there's a surprising amount of games like this by other indie devs that are also quality. garden story was exactly what i was looking for!