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Garden Story’s bosses are usually placed at the end of a dungeon you’re having to explore first and the bosses themselves provide a decent challenge, without being too overbearing. It pretty much only allows three hits, after that it will need to recharge, leaving you running away from enemies, dodging their attacks for a short while until it comes back. However, there is a slight twist here because you do have a stamina bar, which can become quite annoying. The combat itself is fairly simple, since it’s mostly just bashing the A button until the bad thing is dead. Collecting and upgrading weapons and boosting your stats via ‘memories’ are what you will be dealing with, and these are features that I was glad to see. You will spend a lot of your time encountering enemies and bosses along your journey across the Grove and this is where the ‘RPG’ part of the game really comes into play. Perhaps the biggest part of Garden Story is its combat. But, it’s worth noting that Garden Story is very much its own game with its own take on some fantastic features, which can easily be missed if you aren’t paying attention…
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Adventure, RPG, simulation, action you will certainly see similarities between this and other popular games such as Stardew Valley and the Zelda series, from which it clearly takes inspiration. Concord is the newly-appointed Guardian of the Grove, the almighty grape, and they’re on a mission to make the island the best it can be: rebuilding homes, inspiring inhabitants, and removing the dreaded rot from the Grove.
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In Garden Story, you take the role of a cute, perfectly round purple grape known as ‘Concord’. This is what Garden Story has done to me. Locations are overly greebled with landmarks and winding paths, making it difficult to get around with ease or speed-and the map is obtuse, instead of helpful, at a glance.A game centred around fruit and veg doesn’t really sound that entertaining, does it? What if I said they were sentient fruits with adorable faces and tiny arms and legs? Yeah, I’ve never felt so attached to fruits and vegetables. Menus are confusing and difficult to use. But every other aspect of the game feels one step away from being memorable. The art is rich and beautiful, and the interfaces look great.
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This game wants to be very charming, and it sometimes comes very close. I found myself wondering about hard resetting quickly after dying, because the game only saves during your overnight rests. That feels frustrating when the only way to level up your stats and unlock content is by completing the daily gathering and combat goals-but failure to complete them usually means just being shut out of them rather than being imposed a reset penalty. If Concord dies during combat, the day immediately ends with a small financial penalty. Plus, each chapter concludes with a boss fight, featuring bosses that take around 20 hits to kill. Fighting uses progressively stronger weapons and household implements too. Your HP begins with a Zelda-like three “hearts” to start, with upgrades that increase your maximum health throughout the game. Garden Story definitely struggles to make the repetitive gathering and combat tasks more interesting.Ĭombat is one of the places where the game is the least fleshed out, as is the crossover between combat and the game’s other, more pastoral, goals. But by my third day in-game, my slate of goals was just slight variations to the ones I had on the first day. Each day, Concord is given two to three goals, like delivering a handful of a specific resource or ridding an area of its enemies.