Garden Galaxy is hardly a game. Well, that might sound a bit rough, but I do not mean it in any negative fashion. It is more of an experience generator, a virtual toy, a set of blocks for your to play with. It has no palpable goal, no time chasing you, no quests to bend on in search of purpose. Nonetheless, there is a drive behind it that stays strong even hours into the fun – the desire to craft something pretty and the sense of discovery for each and every new piece that can come out of the cauldron.
But I am getting ahead of myself. In Garden Galaxy you’re tossed into virtually empty void, with only one tangible piece – your magical cauldron. Every moment or two a happy little spirit appears, and if you boop them, they jingle away leaving behind a curious coin. If you feed that coin to the cauldron it will spit out a random piece of, well… Stuff. It can be furniture. Decor. Cute plants. A little tool to alter the plane of existence you’re occupying. The item you will get is random, but not completely, as each type of coin has its own selection of possible things to spawn, a catalogue, if you please. So the fun also lies in finding out a new coin you’ve never seen before!
And that’s it. That’s the whole shebang, really. The joy comes from putting it all together, from slowly, steadily getting new pieces, new tools, new tiles with fun biomes, with each possible piece having a chance of pulling just the right lever in your brain to trigger a thought like ‘wait, I like this, I wanna do a little thing with it – gosh I sure do hope to get more of those!’ – and once that happens, you’re in.
Garden Galaxy doesn’t, fortunately, rely entirely on sheer randomness. There are little tools that you can utilize to get more things you wish to see. Piggy Banks can transform any coins to a coin of a certain theme. There are special pieces that let you copy other items or make sure that some items will not spawn again, with your selection deciding what you will get. Don’t get me wrong – ultimately it’s still a Hoarding Simulator by far, where random drops form the bulk of pieces you will be using. But it is entirely within your hands to arrange them to your liking!
It helps that the game style is so tranquil. It’s an extremely soothing game, allowing you to ender a gentle sort of Zen, a meditative state of pure, soft focus, where you just assemble your bits and pieces to something that pleases you on some deep, aesthetic level, imagination weaving plans for the possibilities of the next pieces to come, dreaming of that perfect tile or chair or table you want to see to complete your little square of curated perfection. And once you achieve it, bam, you start your next tiny neighbourhood, with new plans and visions to how to make it pretty, until your tiny virtual village, park, camping ground, beachside takes fuller form.
I had a blast in a few longer sessions of tinkering with Garden Galaxy and it is a soft, calming balm for me after a hard day of work still to this time, from time to time putting it on to just bask in it’s utter, delightful and well executed sense of purposelessness. It is the strongest point of it – freeing you from obligations, expectations, just giving you colourful, pretty toys to play with to your heart content. Exactly how you want and for how short or long you will.
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