Horticular: Build a Garden, Attract Wildlife

Decent Game 6.5/10. I played this game for the "Viva Pinata" vibe and it delivers that feeling in parts but I think is let down slightly in some areas. Creating habitats for animals starts out fun but gradually becomes tedious as you need to attract eight animals of a given species to "master" it, I feel like four might've been a better number for the species mastering. In addition, the decay, sickness and corruption mechanics become quite irritating as the size of the garden increases. You have to pan the camera back and forth to attack enemies with the cursor for what feels like too long especially before the banish spell upgrades to deal more damage. Then as a result of the corruption enemies, one by one your animals will become sick and need to be clicked five or so times to heal them which feels tedious. I also think the animals are missing distinctly interesting visuals, adding different colours or shapes and sizes of animal would be great. All-in-all though, the game is enjoyable for its mostly relaxed atmosphere. Good gameplay loop of creating habitats for animals while simultaneously creating a nice looking garden.

The design element is good, the gnomes are cute, and it's fun trying to get animals to come to your garden, everything else just sucks. So many people said it was like Viva Pinata, it's not. I LOVED Viva Pinata, it was a great game. This game is frustrating and boring. The corruption happens all too often, and always seems to happen when you've conveniently "overloaded" your glove and makes it impossible to cure anything or restore corrupted items. You spend tons of time making a really cool habitat for a specific animal, that animal never shows, but animals you don't want or need do. Some animals will come only after you complete some task, and others need to have specific habitats near each other causing a huge disruption to the whole garden in some cases. Trying to get new items takes forever, the good items cost way too much, so you just sit around waiting to have enough money. It has the makings of a really fun game, unfortunately it's just completely unbalanced and ruins the entire experience. I intend to try to finish the game, maybe my opinion will change the more I play.

I was initially hyped for Horticular but the habitat mess made me quit. I'm certain, this is the main reason people stop playing this game and end up frustrated. Basically every negative review says the same for the past years (!). If animals randomly choose their places, at the very least stop them from moving somewhere where they destroy the habitat of an already established species. The frog-goldfish relationship is a nightmare to deal with and you have to deal with it for the entirety of the game as these are starter animals! Let people delete habitats, how is that not possible?? Why can't we just drag and drop habitats? I had to relocate animals just one tile to the right and it was a nightmare to deal with! Another thing I really don't like are the very slow days of endless waiting. Money is a bottleneck at the beginning, so you end up just staring at the screen until you can finally skip the night and get some new money next morning. Either give us a fast forward button or even better: the skip button stays up all the time. This could be such a nice game but the habitat mechanic stopped me from really enjoying it. I won't continue until that's fixed and I certainly can'…

Likes: It's freaking adorable It can be quite challenging or chill depending on what mode you're playing Dislikes: There isn't enough explaination of how things work The story throws too many things at you too quickly There's no explaination of what the symbols mean To learn how to make the right habitats for the animals they have to visit, but to get them to visit you have to have the right elements of their habitats You can't rotate the camera You can't zoom out far enough to actually see your whole garden I played on story mode for a little while but just got really confused and frustrated. The information from the gnomes explained what to do, but not how to do it so I ended up having to google a lot. I tried playing on creative mode and have been having a lot more fun just building my own little world. Overall, I would recommend it because there are different modes you can play.

Easily one of the best games I've ever downloaded. It's cozy but still has a strategic/competitive edge that makes you want to push for more. If you're looking for something relaxing with a good payoff then this is definitely the game to get.

[h3] Achievement Hunting Rating 1/5 [/h3] Did you ever want a pixel art version of Viva Pinata? This game is a cute garden layout puzzler with some very difficult and tedious achievements to get. While I did really enjoy the premise, I was disheartened to realize just how long it would take to get all the achievements and that some of them are very easy to accidentally mess up and have to start a whole new playthrough to complete. Also you will need the Frozen Frontier DLC to get 100%. Lastly the controls can be a bit tiring for your left click finger and I don't think there's much that can be done to accommodate accessibility needs. Fun idea and pretty well implemented for a small team of developers.