Meet Mutsy, a walking apple with eyes who wants to grow a garden and invite friends over for a dance party.  Help Mutsy do this by designing your own garden and playing mini-games, and even learn some calming exercises along the way.  Garden Buddies is available on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

The main mode of the game is Story Mode.  Here you’ll view the events of around five days where Mutsy discovers a patch of land to make a garden, and friends like acorns, bats, frogs, mushrooms etc. will visit and have a problem to solve.  You’ll interact with Mutsy via a cursor, like on a PC mouse.  At some points in the story, you’ll be prompted to build a certain thing in your garden, or play a mini-game.  But if the mini-game is too hard, you can always skip it.  Luckily the only time that happened with me was with the guitar playing mini-game, which was way too difficult for this kind of game.  Also at some points in the story, you’ll also learn a calming technique like box breathing, affirmations, and more.  Which is good…I guess?

Designing your garden is easy and menu based.  You can place things on your screen and a half patch of land when you have enough flowers for currency, but you can always get more by planting seeds, which eliminates any sort of strategy.  You can place flowers, stones, ponds, rocks, and other structures like a swing or acorn house.  Aside from in the story mode, you can also freely design a garden and play the mini-games separately in the other modes.  My only big problem with the game is that Story Mode takes about an hour or so to beat, so there’s not much of a game here.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  Reading skill is a must because everything is text based.  Garden Buddies is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews