Review: Tiny Garden answers a question you never asked; can you garden in a toy compact?

Tiny Garden brings you gardening, Polly Pocket-style. Your entire garden is inside the lower part of a capsule toy complete with shelves in the upper portion for furniture. You’re given a small bit of land to grow on that will expand as you progress. All you have to do is put down seeds and turn the crank to make them grow. Just be mindful because some plants require specific conditions to grow in!

Tiny Garden is an old favorite by this point on Comfy Cozy Gaming. We’ve reviewed this game at its prototype stage and demo phase. Finally, we’ve been able to play the full game.

Tiny Garden: Part toy, part garden with the fun of both!

Tiny Garden is, quite frankly, adorable. It takes the concept of a childhood favorite and asks how it can be turned into something new. In this case, it’s now a compact with gardening plots ready for you to sow seeds and reap the rewards.

You start off with just a few plots to grow on, but as you grow and achieve things, more plots will open up for you to plant on. At first, you’ve got a few humble vegetables to plop down that don’t need anything special beyond the turning of a crank. 

You plop down the seed, turn the handle, and – TA DA! – you have produce. 

It seems straightforward and simple, but it slowly becomes a strategy and puzzle game because in order to unlock different seeds, you need to have certain produce on hand. 

In the beginning, you’re going to be toiling away, trying to build up a stock of vegetables so that you can trade them for different types of vegetation to grow. This is the overarching theme of the game. Grow one plant to excess so that you can grow other plants to excess, and so on and so forth.

I won’t lie, this can feel a bit tedious at first, especially once you get far enough along the line that it’s not just about planting carrots to grow turnips. All of a sudden you need to grow A to get B to get C to get D so that you can grow E. 

It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs that seems neverending…

Not only are you trying to juggle the plants, but you have to manage biomes as well. Certain plants require specific conditions like needing shade, snow, or water. So, now you’re having to manage your limited land to create these conditions and it can be hard to manage. Generally, the conditions to make a certain soil type can take several precious squares of space. 

So, now you’re managing different plot types and toiling through your vegetables with no end in sight. That is, until, you unlock the sunflower. The sunflower is your saving grace. It requires grassland to grow on and to get that grassland you need either two bushes or two raspberry bushes adjacent to each other to create two diagonal bits of grass.

Once you have that, you can grow your sunflower. Now, that’s where the magic happens. The sunflower will cause a beam of sparkling light to shine down on the block in front of it and anything grown on it will give you seeds back of that type.

This means, if you grow a carrot, you’re always guaranteed to get a carrot seed packet. No more toiling away trying to grow everything before something else because as long as you can plant it once, you can plant it, ad infinitum, as long as you grow it on the sparkle block.

Normally, you will only be able to get the sparkles to shine down on a regular soil block, but I managed to get a second one to shine down on water. Once I had those, I was a machine. No longer was I burdened by the process, I was creating left, right, and center.

The sunflower is, without a doubt, the single most important block to gameplay. Without it, you will not be having a good time.

Sadly, with the space available and the way that some blocks need to be created, it’s not possible to be able to have a sunflower shine down on every soil type – at least, not from what I’ve been able to create. But, having it for some helps exponentially.

Now that you have your well-oiled machine working for you by giving you a return on seeds, you can focus on unlocking all the produce. With your spoils, you can trade them in for furniture or ways to decorate your compact. 

You can buy color schemes that change the color of your toy, the crops, and even the furniture you can place in the upper part. You can, also, buy stickers to decorate the outside of the shell which has many familiar faces from other cozy games. And, lastly, you can buy options for the atmosphere. The toy floats in space, but you can change the color scheme of it to better match your compact.

As you unlock things, you’ll get letters that represent a vague story and you can unlock a few extra bits for achievements. Otherwise, that’s kind of the whole gist. 

You grow produce in order to grow more kinds and then use those to buy things. Who doesn’t love a good bartering system?

Overall, I think it’s a delightful game, but I do have some qualms. While the game is straightforward, you do NOT get any instruction on how to create some soil types. You just have to keep tinkering with it until you figure it out which can be very frustrating in the moment. 

All I can really say is that sometimes when a fruit is fully grown, you can continue to turn the crank, and produce may continue to change. 

If you want to give Tiny Garden a try, you can get it on Steam for $12.99. Personally, for the gameplay that I experienced, I think it might be a tiny bit steep since it was only about 4 hours of gameplay for me, but I would still recommend the game if you’re interested. 

Otherwise, you can check out our latest review we did of Urban Jungle. It’s a cute little game where you get to put down a massive amount of plants, you just have to make sure their conditions are met to keep them happy.