This game is fine. There's not much which I absolutely loved and a few things annoyed me a bit. I'd say I enjoyed playing garden story, although I'm just the precise amount of lukewarm on it that this review is ending up surprisingly hard to write.
I can certainly vibe with being a grape, in fact the greenling characters are refreshing in general. The presentation is quite pleasant. I like the soundtrack, although there's nothing memorable within it. Similarly I like the visuals, although there's not much memorable beauty that stands out to me. The vibes probably carry the game away from being bad.
The gameplay is a bit weak, but it was mostly serviceable for the experience. I like the focus on being a helper to the community instead of the standard adventure game hero who forgets every place they leave. There's some satisfying progression, although some of it is a bit tedious. This game serves you one of the staple video game experiences: the fantasy of helping out to fix the world and growing in power.
My favorite part of this game is the perk system. Your character connects with the experiences of previous guardians, and can slot any unlocked ones into a limited capacity of active memories. I love the thematic essence of this system and I think it's design works excellently for the game. It's neat how all at once the game encourages some minor side objectives, strengthens the world, gives you some build choices and an exciting thing to be rewarded with.
Speaking of the world, I like it. It has an interesting identity, although there's nothing about the world that jumped out to me as incredibly fascinating. This is probably the strongest aspect that makes the game work for me. I like how there's different towns you focus on instead of spending the whole game in one.
The town requests are incredibly tedious. Imagine the notice board in stardew valley, but it's tied to the progression of the community and your character. If you want tool upgrades I hope you enjoy wasting your time. At some level this system works for the experience the game is going for, but at some point in the playthrough I simply snapped and just grew sick of them.
The combat is bad. It doesn't feel good and doesn't present any meaningful challenge. You have a dodge roll, which is a nice bare minimum for a game, but you barely need it. The slime enemy you fight most often is a bit annoying. The dungeons are bad. The puzzles are slow and uninteresting.
I hope you like going through these waste of time dungeons multiple times... tool upgrades and some community requests will require materials that can only be gotten from them. Shoutout to the absurd amount of driftwood that the game demands from you... even though you can only get like 4-6 per run of a boring lil dungeon. Shoutout to the 2 incredibly minor shortcuts that would save you at most a few seconds of your life in total... which requires you to rerun a dungeon to unlock them. Shoutout to the combat request that asks you to fight stuff in a dungeon that you can't voluntarily leave. Shoutout to the incredibly slow and tedious block pushing puzzles in that one dungeon, they really shined the 3rd time.
The building mechanic feels pretty pointless. Why can you only build in certain locations. Why is there so little meaningful things you can build. Either this system should have been cut, or the game should have been strongly designed around it.
There's top-down sliding ice physics implemented in one of the areas, but no ice puzzles. How could you do this to me 😦
I like the healing system of this game. It's the standard flask/charges of healing, except you acquire flasks each with different properties and can fill them with healing juice that itself has different properties. It's pretty neat!
I can certainly vibe with being a grape, in fact the greenling characters are refreshing in general. The presentation is quite pleasant. I like the soundtrack, although there's nothing memorable within it. Similarly I like the visuals, although there's not much memorable beauty that stands out to me. The vibes probably carry the game away from being bad.
The gameplay is a bit weak, but it was mostly serviceable for the experience. I like the focus on being a helper to the community instead of the standard adventure game hero who forgets every place they leave. There's some satisfying progression, although some of it is a bit tedious. This game serves you one of the staple video game experiences: the fantasy of helping out to fix the world and growing in power.
My favorite part of this game is the perk system. Your character connects with the experiences of previous guardians, and can slot any unlocked ones into a limited capacity of active memories. I love the thematic essence of this system and I think it's design works excellently for the game. It's neat how all at once the game encourages some minor side objectives, strengthens the world, gives you some build choices and an exciting thing to be rewarded with.
Speaking of the world, I like it. It has an interesting identity, although there's nothing about the world that jumped out to me as incredibly fascinating. This is probably the strongest aspect that makes the game work for me. I like how there's different towns you focus on instead of spending the whole game in one.
The town requests are incredibly tedious. Imagine the notice board in stardew valley, but it's tied to the progression of the community and your character. If you want tool upgrades I hope you enjoy wasting your time. At some level this system works for the experience the game is going for, but at some point in the playthrough I simply snapped and just grew sick of them.
The combat is bad. It doesn't feel good and doesn't present any meaningful challenge. You have a dodge roll, which is a nice bare minimum for a game, but you barely need it. The slime enemy you fight most often is a bit annoying. The dungeons are bad. The puzzles are slow and uninteresting.
I hope you like going through these waste of time dungeons multiple times... tool upgrades and some community requests will require materials that can only be gotten from them. Shoutout to the absurd amount of driftwood that the game demands from you... even though you can only get like 4-6 per run of a boring lil dungeon. Shoutout to the 2 incredibly minor shortcuts that would save you at most a few seconds of your life in total... which requires you to rerun a dungeon to unlock them. Shoutout to the combat request that asks you to fight stuff in a dungeon that you can't voluntarily leave. Shoutout to the incredibly slow and tedious block pushing puzzles in that one dungeon, they really shined the 3rd time.
The building mechanic feels pretty pointless. Why can you only build in certain locations. Why is there so little meaningful things you can build. Either this system should have been cut, or the game should have been strongly designed around it.
There's top-down sliding ice physics implemented in one of the areas, but no ice puzzles. How could you do this to me 😦
I like the healing system of this game. It's the standard flask/charges of healing, except you acquire flasks each with different properties and can fill them with healing juice that itself has different properties. It's pretty neat!