"Tiny Eden" has Cultivated a Fun Take on Gardening Sims! (Impressions)

Generally, I am not a farming/gardening sim person. Games like Stardew Valley, while excellent design-wise, just never quite hooked me in the way it has for millions of people. Yet when I was scrolling through upcoming releases, I came across Tiny Eden, a cozy gardening sim that takes place in an apartment overlooking a futuristic cityscape in the not-too-distant year of 2050. Even in a dystopic-looking future, we can still get by with little hobbies that make us feel sane despite the horrors. After sitting with it for about an hour, some gears were starting to turn for me, and I ended up finding myself interested in taking care of my virtual plants.

Just don't tell my mother I said that, or she'll make me start a garden in our backyard.

Tiny Eden takes a more realistic approach to handling plants through the growth process. Rather than just setting a seed down and clicking a water pail on it, you have to manually place seeds and pour enough water to keep the plants healthy. In addition, the placement of the planters is also important as some plants are more sensitive to specific temperatures than others, so you may have to open a window if it's too hot for the plant to stay healthy, for example. I like this attention to detail, because it makes you think more critically about how to arrange your planters and section them off depending on what things certain plants need.

At its core, this is a cozy game, so naturally there are interactions that make you feel a little warm and fuzzy inside. After harvesting fruits and vegetables from your planters, you can cook them into recipes and deliver them to your neighbors to gain some money and reputation. Throughout the game, you'll need to boost your reputation with the DIY Club inside your apartment complex in order to gain access to more seeds and expand your apartment with new rooms. While this was neat to chip away at, I did find the quests were not that interesting to do, as it was just delivering the same food items to the exact same NPC every single time. Since this was the demo, I would imagine this will be far more fleshed out in the full game, but it certainly felt a bit boring to do those delivery quests knowing the same NPC would always be waiting for me in the same spot.

At a glance, Tiny Eden is a delightful cozy gardening sim worth diving into. I enjoyed the expanded plant growing process and extra factors like indoor temperature playing a role in keeping things growing. The visual aesthetic and lo-fi music make for a really chill experience overall, and the later features in the game including growing/harvesting automation allow you to appreciate the surroundings a lot more while cultivating an array of home-grown goodies.

Tiny Eden will release on Steam on September 7, and currently has a demo available.