1 
0 Craft, explore and farm in Neat Corporations new cozy simulation game Garden Of The Sea. Originally released for VR, the team have made the game available on Steam and Nintendo Switch to open up to a wider host of players. Now you can also have fun exploring the man islands surrounding your new home!
Time to make this island a home!
Have you played Garden of the Sea? Or are you a fan of cozy sim games? Either way let us know in the comments what you think!
Gameplay
Garden of the Sea introduces you to a small island that you now call home. There is a very simple tutorial that teaches you how to grow plants and use the basic tools available to you and then it leaves you to figure everything out. From planting crops to befriending wildlife, there is plenty for players to do as they take up their watering can.
To provide some direction, quest-like goals are given to players via Potpots. These Potpots come in various shapes and sizes and give you things such as recipes to improve your home, or to unlock future islands. On the whole, they’re pretty easy to understand. Although they can occasionally be a bit difficult when you haven’t yet discovered the type of flower that they want from you.
The control system for this game is pretty easy to get to grips with. Unfortunately, though, they’re not fully explained to you in some cases and you have to figure out what you’re doing with little to no direction. If there are certain aspects of the game that you don’t like, you can get away with ignoring them for a while. For example, I didn’t spend a lot of my time fishing as I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed dealing with the creatures on my island.
Decorate, farm, sail or fish?
If you like games such as House Flipper, then you’ll enjoy the decorating elements of Garden Of The Sea. Merchants float from dock to dock and offer different items to add some colour to your home. To obtain these items, you need to have shells which you can get by selling your plants, fish and materials.
There are plenty of elements in this game that stops the gameplay feeling repetitive. If you don’t feel like fishing, you can go exploring and develop your islands. You don’t ever have to feel like you’re stuck, you can play the game in a way that suits your play style.
Bugs & Issues
Whilst playing Garden Of The Sea, I didn’t experience many bugs or issues. Yet, when I had too many items floating in the various Potpot orbs, the game did crash a few times. This may not be the cause of the issue but removing some of the items did seem to fix the problem.
Fortunately it didn’t take long to get back to where I was when the game crashed. It did get pretty annoying pretty quickly, though, as I had to redo things.
I also had an issue where if I dropped something on a shelf, I wouldn’t be able to pick them up again. For example, I threw a packet of turnip seeds onto the shelf near a pond on the main island and it clipped slightly through the furniture and made it impossible to pick up unless I reloaded the game.
Graphics & Audio
Garden of the Sea is a very pretty game, there is no denying that. However, I would recommend turning down the camera sensitivity straight away as the speedy camera might trigger any motion sickness. I also had a few frame rate issues where the game felt like it was playing catch up with itself.
Longevity
With plenty of islands to explore once you have unlocked your little boat, there is plenty that can be done to increase the playtime of Garden Of The Sea. If you are a fan of farming simulation games you’ll have no issue in getting lost in the atmosphere. The only thing that stopped me playing this game was the crashing. If it hadn’t been for that then I think I could have easily spent hours playing this game. You have free rein to do whatever you want which is one of its selling points.
It takes around 5 hours to complete the main story however there is no rush to get things done.
Final Thoughts
Garden of the Sea is a cute little game that allows you to build up the world around you. It’s friendly vibes make it easy to get lost in the moment as you find the ingredients and explore the world around you. Ultimately my review award for this game has been impacted by the glitches and crashing. It is still a good game and I would recommend it, but these bugs definitely get annoying to deal with.
For this reason Garden Of The Sea gets the Thumb Culture Silver Award
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
Check out the Garden of the Sea trailer below – see what you can expect if you add it to your Switch library! You can also check out our other Nintendo Switch reviews here to expand your gaming collection.
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