Tiny Garden is a delightful experience. While it promised much for nostalgia, with early, eye-catching trailers showing off a garden set on a Polly Pocket-like clamshell toy, it goes much further beyond this, to be a wholly satisfying gardening experience with a bright and surprising sense of strategy.
Your journey in Tiny Garden begins simply enough, in a minimalist world where all you must do is plant a seed, then wind a crank for water. A plant pops out, and hey presto, you’ve grown your first crop. But the game masks much complexity in its design, as each new crop unlocks another new crop – and you must then take on a mini-puzzle to unlock your next steps.
At first, the game is generous with crops. You’ll unlock a radish, then a carrot, then so on. But suddenly, the path grows wilder – as you’re asked for lilypads that require water tiles, or fruits that must be planted on grassy ground. Some plants, when harvested or put into a certain arrangement, will change the terrain they’re planted in. If you’re clever about your placements, you’ll unlock a particular tile that can be used to grow rarer seeds.
Add in special tools that can flood tiles or create rice trunks, and you end up having to Tetris your garden to ensure you can grow the optimal amount and array of crops, in a practice that requires real forethought and strategy.
If you plan really well, about the half-point, you’ll unlock a sunflower that enables seed reproduction on tiles with sunshine. That’s where the strategy elements really pick up, as you can ensure any plants you grow on particular tiles are replicated, and you can create a conveyor belt of seeds and plants that will unlock every part of Tiny Garden.
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In its layered approach to strategy, Tiny Garden really tickled my brain. It made me lock in almost immediately after I clocked the chain-like nature of unlocking each plant.
While there is busywork to unlock certain plants and tools, it’s so satisfying to sit down and figure out how to get to your next goal. Sometimes, it’s about chaining seeds – planting a radish, then a carrot, then a hydrangea bush, then a potato, then flooding a tile, then so on. Sometimes, it’s about unlocking certain characteristics of seeds.
Minor spoiler, but a regular grape may turn into a better grape if you add more water.
The game also knows when to step back with the busy work, providing tools to gather more and better quality seeds, or allowing you to replicating seeds once you discover the sunflower. It makes the entire process feel well-earned, so by the time you’re sitting back, churning out new seeds with every pluck, you can feel like you’ve puzzled through all the intricacies, and that you’ve earned a reprieve.
At this point in Tiny Garden, once the sun is shining on your rich crops, and you’ve begun to unlock the upper tier seeds by corralling snow and lava tiles, you can indulge in the other half of the game: decorating a cosy living space, using furniture you’ve unlocked with plant seeds.
When you’re not blasting through the game’s seed menu, attempting to unlock every facet of this system, Tiny Garden encourages you to sit back, place furniture in a cosy shell, play around with light and colour, and decorate your clamshell garden with all sorts of stickers (there’s even sticker cameos from the Duck Detective, Pablo the Grapple Dog, and more indie favourites).
There is a high plant cost to unlocking many of the game’s fancier decorations, so if you want a pretty base, you will need to take the time to grow extra crops and spend them on upgrades. But if you do, you’ll end up with a snazzy little living space you can admire and reminisce within.
It took me some time to unlock the furniture I wanted – I had my eyes on the tiny little washing machine for ages – but I was pretty happy with my end result. More to the point, it was a lovely replication of one of my favourite childhood toys growing up, a Fruit Surprise Polly Pocket I was given by my childhood friend, Phoebe. (Thank you, Phoebe. It ruled.)
While your decorated space doesn’t do much, outside of unlocking vague letters to form a very loose story around the game, it’s a cute inclusion, and one that amps up the nostalgia of this gardening sim.
Even without firmer goals (beyond unlocking new plants) or more traditional gameplay elements, I was enamoured by my time with Tiny Garden, and how it combines nostalgia with tight, clever mechanics for an entirely different sort of gaming experience.
It’s not a particularly deep game, and you’ll likely be able to unlock everything it has to offer within a 4-5 hour stretch of planting, experimenting, and decorating – but it’s a very moreish sandbox, and one that is incredibly cute and novel. Developer Ao Norte had a clear vision in the creation of this game, and it has realised it well, for a bite-sized game that’s a simple joy to be part of.
Breathe deeply and smell the roses in Tiny Garden, and you’ll find a lovely, rich scent lingering.
Three-and-a-half stars: ★★★½
Tiny Garden
Platform(s): PC,
Developer: Ao Norte
Publisher: Super Rare Originals
Release Date: 8 April 2025
A PC code for Tiny Garden was provided by the publisher and played on a Steam Deck for the purposes of this review. GamesHub reviews are rated on a ten-point scale.
