Review: Garden of the Sea Is Underwhelming on the Switch

Garden of the Sea aims to be a cosy life-sim, where the central hook involves farming crops, building structures, befriending animals, and exploring nearby islands. The title was initially released in 2022 as a VR game. I think this is important to point out because, although there are some enduring aspects that work well outside of the VR experience, it does not translate well to the Switch.

If you’ve ever played Budget Cuts, Neat Corporation’s previous title, you might expect Garden of the Sea to incorporate frantic, over-the-top gameplay, but this game features a far more tranquil tone. You find yourself on a deserted island inhabited only by local animals. There is no dialogue. You only find signs indicating which items you need to craft. To say the plot feels minimal and quite basic would be an understatement. The first few episodes of the TV series Lost offer more in-depth reasons why the characters ended up on an island, which is saying something.

Once you begin exploring, you’ll undergo a brief tutorial introducing the basic controls and showing you how to grow crops. Planting and harvesting are relatively straightforward. You can grow crops like carrots and radishes by placing seeds, watering them, and waiting for them to grow. When they are ready, you pick them up from the ground. If you don’t get to it in time, the plants wither away and you will have to water them again to revive them. After completing the tutorial, you’ll get the freedom to choose how you spend your time, with minimal guidance provided. You could go sightseeing and bond with animals like penguins or make progress and attempt to fulfill the specific tasks illustrated on the signs. The entire atmosphere feels like going on a glamping trip, as everything feels so relaxed.

Within the environment, you will often find scraps of paper with vague drawings of items like flowers or rocks, indicating what components are needed for specific buildings. It’s almost like a game of Pictureka. Sadly, the Garden of the Sea building process is unsatisfying and somewhat ambiguous. An excellent example of this occurs at the beginning of the game. I need edto make several fences, one of many items required to create some buildings. First, I needed to gather several pieces of wood using a hand axe to break down a large log. Afterwards, I had to put these pieces of wood into a crafting bubble to turn them into a fence. However, the game never explained how to do so, which meant stumbling into it.

Now, you might think that the above process does not sound too bad! It might even seem like some head-scratching puzzles. However, an issue amplifies this tedious process and even hurts the laid-back tone. You can only carry a handful of items at one given time, which makes perfect sense. But if you drop items on the ground, they can disappear and never return. This made me very reluctant to switch between jobs, which goes against the freestyle nature of the game and forces you to stick with a particular task.

One problem I ran into involved building a boat, which is needed to explore nearby islands. To obtain the steering wheel for the boat, you will need to feed the sea creature known as the Manateecow three turnips. The problem is that I did this action without knowing it was tied to the boat construction task. I naively dropped the steering wheel, thinking I could return to it later, but it disappeared. Luckily, I recently saved, so I kept the wheel in my inventory until I had the other necessary parts. But hypothetically, if I hadn’t just saved minutes prior, I would have been forced into restarting my entire game from scratch. Otherwise, I would have had no other way of getting off the home island. This led to me always strategically planning what building I think I could potentially do rather than allowing me to engage in trial and error.

On a technical level, the graphics might not be the most elaborate, but I really liked the aesthetic design of Garden of the Sea. It is packed with bright and colorful colors, making some of the environmental spaces you traverse through more engaging. One of the islands is a bamboo outback, and another is constantly shrouded by night. So they all have a distinctive feel to them. The creatures are also adorable and were hands down my favorite aspect of exploring all the islands. The animals range from birds to flying catfish and even a whale. Many of them are humorously oversized, and you can build up your friendship with these creatures by feeding and petting them. Later down the line, you can take polaroid photos of the animals with your camera and even breed them in the many stables you can build.

Garden of the Sea attempts to be a laid-back life simulator as you roam around a deserted island. But, the absence of structured tasks or rewarding objectives may lessen its appeal over time. This is further not helped by gameplay bugs, which make some of these tasks more bothersome than they should be. Ultimately, I don’t know why you would choose to play this title in its current state over hard hitters in the genre, like Stardew Valley.

Garden of the Sea is now available on the PS5, PC, and Switch, as well as VR headsets like the Meta Quest.