Amelia is a young woman who finds a rooftop garden filled with broken pots, so she decides to fix them and plant things in them to restore the garden.  Help her do so by solving simple jigsaw puzzles and playing a planting mini-game on Nintendo Switch.  Amelia’s Garden is actually a sequel/spinoff to a game I reviewed a while back called Tell Me Your Story, Amelia just being a bit older since the last game.  But if it weren’t for the similar art styles and the fact that the press release told me so, I would’ve had no idea these two games were related (I didn’t even know Amelia was her name in the first game).

When you start the game, you’ll see a rooftop garden with many broken pots.  Hit the X button to start the process of fixing things up.  First you’ll play a simple jigsaw puzzle where you put the pots together.  Use the cursor and button to click on pieces and drag them in place, and the L and R buttons to rotate them.  Once you put the pot together, it’s time to play the planting mini-game.

In the planting game, you’ll first use the cursor to fill the pot with soil.  Then you hold down the cursor over the seed packet and move the L stick up and down to shake the seeds out.  Then drag a watering hose with the cursor to water the plant until the meter is full.  Then press down two buttons to…summon the sun (what kind of god-like powers does Amelia have?) to help the plant grow.  Just release the buttons when the meter is full.  And then press the button while the cursor is over the plant a few times to prune it and you’ve finished.  Repeat the process 20 times for all the pots and you’ll be done with the game!

After finishing all 20 pots, which won’t take very long, the only other thing you can really do is arrange the pots in your garden and that’s it.  Plus there’s not really any challenge to this one, I don’t think you can even lose.  Sometimes the cursor controls can be a bit touchy, but it doesn’t ruin the game.  But if you want just a simple mindless diversion, this one’s certainly more playable than the game it spun off from.

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Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but not necessary just to play.  Amelia’s Garden is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews