

This will separate the Mana Crystal from The Grove. I just wish I had more reason to use every weapon in the game.At the end of Garden Story, Guardian Concord will fight and defeat The Grove's Clutch. What I thought would be a laid back adventure actually had me putting in a good amount of effort. But I loved the design of them all, figuring out when I could attack them, getting better and better until I could survive just long enough. The weird thing about the bosses in the game, is that they all have a really small health pool in all honesty, but it’s still a marathon on trying to defeat them as you do 0-2 damage every attack, which really made them feel drawn out. Especially when you’re dying while learning the boss’s attacks. So having to redo the same puzzles and encounters over and over got really annoying. For as challenging and puzzling as they were, if you died in them, you started right back at the start. There were only a small handful of dungeons in the game, and this is where the gameplay annoyed me most. Even throwing your fishing rod required stamina, but not reeling in your catch. Or if I wanted to block, I’d need stamina, but yet blocking never affected your stamina bar. So after three attacks, I’d have to run away and wait for it to replenish. So the whole game, I only had 3 stamina slots, which again, diminished if I did anything. You can equip skills, called “memories” that can give you more stamina if you’d like, but they usually have a downside to them. You have a stamina bar, first and foremost, that depletes in chunks depending on if you roll, run, or attack. It was slow, clunky, and the enemy movements made absolutely no sense, so it was a hit or miss on whether I’d get through the enemies without a scratch or not. The combat was something that I expected to be a little smoother at the end of the day, but it felt like it blended too many things so it never had an identity of its own. Which I guess wasn’t as much of an issue, considering I had a bunch all at the same and I could switch whenever, so I had plenty of healing on me, so long as I always had them stocked. This was the same for upgrading my health flasks.

Garden story game map upgrade#
So when I wanted to upgrade the weapons I used the most, I was running to each town to figure out what one had which upgrades. As you progress in the game, you can take specific resources to a store and upgrade your items, but only the items you got in that town.
Garden story game map series#
With more than one town in the game, this sort of brought in a series of its own headaches to deal with. Like one who needed help fixing items around town so they could go on vacation! Usually boiling down to basic fetch quests, but they were fun to see the story of the characters unfold. Luckily for people who enjoy this mechanic, there’s more than one town in the game! In each town, there’s even a few side quests you can take part in. During the start of each in-game day, you get a series of requests that you can or can’t do, but if you do them, it helps the town that you’re in, by bringing in more items for you to purchase in stores, or by letting you find more resources around that specific area. The game felt like a town building game, mixed with an action game. But in the end, the game ended up being smaller and more compact than I thought it was going to be. When I first started the game, I thought it was going to be a huge, sprawling adventure, with the map screen being a sprawling screen with a 31×31 grid. But that’s probably more my fault than anything. I’d find myself zoning out during the story cutscenes and just sort of grabbing the basis of “bad things are bad, let’s stop it.”. Though it is all very cute in the long run, it’s also filled with dread and a lot darker than I expected it to truly be, but it also felt a touch boring. With themes ranging from self doubt, and having to ask others for help, and never underestimating people just because they’re new to something. The story is honestly a little slow throughout the journey, with a small little dose of a coming of age journey. Soon you find out about the rot that has slowly spread across the land and how it’s your task to help keep it at bay, just like every Guardian before you has done. One day, you’re called upon by Plum to leave the KinderGarden that you call home, and take up your role as a Guardian of the Grove, even if everyone is a little hesitant. ReviewĪs little grape Concord, you’re all alone in a section of the Grove called the KinderGarden.

It was then published by Rose City Games for release on PC, Switch, and Xbox One in August 2021. Garden Story is an isometric action game that was developed by indie studio Picogram.
