Demo: Tiny Garden – A game that makes you want to put down roots

Tiny Garden is something that we got the chance to test the prototype build on, so seeing it finally in the demo phase is pretty exciting!

If you’re unfamiliar with Tiny Garden, it’s a little farm builder that rests inside a capsule toy. If you’re familiar with a Polly Pocket, then you’ll understand the premise of this game. The toy opens up into the top and bottom half. In the top half, you can decorate the space with furniture and decorations. In the bottom half, you’ll have farmland to take care of.

There is no traditional currency system in Tiny Garden; you make all your purchases with produce. For instance, an item might require two carrots or a carrot, pea, and sweet potato. Likewise, seed packets require different produce in order to buy them.

At first, you’re doing this carousel of planting where you’re just trying to open up stuff and expand your catalog of vegetables. As you do, you’ll notice that some things need specific biomes in order to grow there. For instance, a potato needs moist soil, so you have to make sure that you have a water feature down in order to make a block of the right environment.

Things like bushes, sunflowers, and cacti will create different environments, so it’s important to experiment. Your goal, however, is to try and get the sunflower because it will beam sunlight to the block in front of it making it a “sparkle” block. Anything that grows in that spot will produce seed packets along with the produce. 

Opening that changes Tiny Garden entirely and really speeds things up. 

I noticed that between the prototype and the demo phase, things have really been ramped up. Things seem to work a bit more fluidly and there are so many more customization options. I mentioned the furniture and being able to decorate the top half, but you have more personalization capabilities. You can unlock stickers to decorate the outside of the compact, an atmosphere to change the background, and colors that change the outside color of the toy, the plants, and the furniture inside.

It’s a lot of fun trying to keep things in rotation and can feel a bit like a puzzle when you have to plant ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’, to get to ‘D’. Plus, it makes me ridiculously happy to decorate the compact. Everything about Tiny Garden is so charming. If you haven’t tried out the demo yet, I highly recommend that you do so over on Steam.