Tiny Garden, a Simple & Relaxing Puzzler, Perfect for the Steam Deck - Preview

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Now, when you hear the name "Tiny Garden" you might be thinking, what on earth could this game be about? Well, shockingly, it's exactly what it sounds like, the entire game is based around you running a tiny garden, but it has a bit more depth to it than you might first think and ended up being a great game to just sit back and pick up every now and then.

I got to play the new Steam Next Fest demo a little early, so here's what I think of the game.

Tiny Garden - Gameplay Impressions

Tiny Garden starts off with a really simple concept, plant seeds on a grid, and then crank the handle on your little pocket toy that your garden resides in to advance time and grow your crops. After your initial crop harvest, you'll start to realize that there is more to this game than meets the eye.

Firstly, the area you can grow in gradually expands with more tiles, and secondly, different types of terrain start to appear, affected by the plants that you have chosen to grow and the tools you are using. Different types of crops need different types of terrain to grow, and this represents the core gameplay of Tiny Garden.

If you plant a cactus, for example, adjacent tiles to that cactus will turn to desert when the cactus is fully grown. Growing Hydrangea flowers will turn the tile it grew on to grass. Placing a Water Fountain will cause 3 tiles in front of it in a row to turn into waterlogged tiles, suitable for growing plants like lily pads.

This turns Tiny Garden into a puzzle game. You have to place and arrange your crops in such a way that they complement, instead of hinder each other. Placing Cacti near most plants will kill them, as few plants can grow in the desert tiles. Planting Hydrangea will turn the ground to grass, so when you harvest the Hydrangea, you can plant Dandelion seeds in their place to grow them.

New seeds are gained by trading harvested crops for seeds, meaning you'll need to figure out how to grow each type of crop in order to progress and unlock new types. There is a handy chart in the menu that tells you the different terrain types.

Seeds aren't the only things you can exchange crops for either. If you have an abundance, you can start to splash out on some decorations, allowing you to decorate the other part of the pocket toy, which is a little room in which you can place furniture and decor. You can even put stickers on the outside of your toy if you wish.

Tiny Garden really is a nice experience. It's all about relaxation. There is no penalty for being inefficient with your crops, or just ruining your garden for a few turns by planting loads of cacti and turning it all into desert. A few turns of the crank later and it's all back to soil as if nothing happened. The game even gives you free seeds every few turns to make sure you haven't gotten stuck with no crops or seeds. It's the perfect game to lay on your sofa and chill with for a few minutes at a time.

Tiny Garden - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Tiny Garden is an almost perfect game on the Steam Deck. It supports the 1280x800 native resolution of the Steam Deck, and it runs really well. The main downside is the controls. There is no gamepad support for the game, meaning we're stuck emulating a mouse and keyboard. This can pose some issues, as by default there is no way to rotate the camera, which isn't essential, but is nice. So mapping a couple of buttons to Q and E for camera rotation and R and T for placement rotation is a good idea.

Also, turning the crank can be difficult with a touchpad. It would have been nice if there had been a button assigned to turn the crank, even though the novelty of turning the crank by hand is quite nice.

Performance-wise, although I played the game at 90 FPS and mostly saw a 12W power draw, you can lower the FPS limit to 60 FPS and it'll draw around 9-10W, meaning you could easily get close to 5 hours of battery from an OLED Steam Deck, and probably around 3.5 hours from an LCD model.

Final Thoughts

I think Tiny Garden is shaping up to be a really sweet and relaxing title. My main wish right now is to have proper controller support added, as it would make the title absolutely perfect for the Steam Deck. But even without, it's still fully playable and I'd definitely recommend you try out the Steam Next Fest demo yourself.

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