“We should go to the dungeon at some point.”
“Fair enough, let me just gather my pumpkins first.”
“Okay, I’ll harvest my flowers and make some nice bouquets for the shop in the meantime.”
“Now I need to milk the cows and then get my pies baking.”
“I’ll just quickly run to the nearby caves and gather the available geodes. Then I’ll do a sweep by the waterfall and see if I can find some purple cosmos flowers.”
“Oooh, if I can find three more eggs we can finish James’ quest.”
“Ooh, I can actually finish the dandelion collection at the museum if I can find a green one. I’ll check the islands to the south.”
“Have you seen the costume shop today? It has a ladybug sweater!”
“Have you seen the summer festival? It has a tractor riding game!”
“It’s almost midnight now, time to head home.”
“Weren’t we supposed to go to the dungeon?”
“Oh right. Oh well, we’ll go tomorrow. After I harvest my pumpkins.”
Garden Paws is a passion project of a couple who set out to make a game that they would enjoy playing together. It was a success on Kickstarter and is currently a hit on Steam, let’s see if they succeeded.
The story is basically Stardew Valley: you inherited your grandparents’ farm while they travel the world and your task is to take care of it, man the shop, and help the town of Florens to flourish.
The usual
The game has all the usual elements of a farming simulator: loads of different seeds you can plant, animals you can domesticate and care for, cooking recipes you can bake, ores you can mine, fish you can fish, and furniture and other embellishments you can make to pretty up the farm. Hopefully, grandpa likes the rainbow paw pattern we used for the living room sofa and table because we sold the old furniture.
Some things like wood and ores you can simply gather, others like seeds you need to buy. So you need a way to finance your adventures, which leads us to your shop. You can sell all sorts of things there, but obviously raw materials are worth a lot less than carefully hand-crafted organic pumpkin pies for example.
Our town
The town is full of cute little furry creatures like yourself, each with their own passions and goals you can help them achieve. Sammy, the bunny, really wants a wagon for selling his seeds, and Petey, the pirate, really likes treasure. Most of them are likeable and have loads of requests for you.
Progressing through quests will unlock new shops, locations, and schematics, allowing you to do even more quests, and build new tools that help your empire be more efficient. For example, you can make a better axe to cut down trees faster, make sprinklers that water your plants automatically, have seed makers so you don’t have to buy your seeds anymore, etc.
Crafting
The game is absolutely full of decorative items, like furniture, flower pots, beach chairs, festive decorations. You can also find new skins and clothes for your characters. It is always a good sign when faffing around with this stuff is fun in a game.
You can build pretty much anywhere on the map, except for the main town island. We kept our farm at the starting location but built up an elaborate glider ramp system that allows us to quickly traverse large distances. There aren’t any limitations on how you can combine the different building elements, so feel free to go nuts.
There is also a dungeon in the game, with regular and boss levels and a special dungeon shop where you can buy badass wizard robes.
Seasons may change…
Just like Stardew Valley, this game also features seasonal events. There is an Easter egg hunt, a Halloween island, and some summer and winter games. The seasons also determine what kind of flowers, fruits, and vegetables grow in the wild, and some animals also only show up during a specific time of the year, thus triggering time-sensitive quests.
The Good
Cuteness overload
Okay, first things first, Garden Paws is really cute, really, really, really cute. You play as these furry or scaly or feathery little creatures with cute music in the background, running around doing cute stuff. So yeah, it is adorable.
Light RPG that works
Thankfully it is also really satisfying to build up your little shop, figure out which products are most profitable, try to find your niche market. We ended up with a Flowers & Pies shop, as one of us got into bouquets, and the other into pumpkins.
I am not sure how, but we somehow managed to learn all the NPCs names. I think this is pretty rare, we were able to just refer to them as Thorne and Sadie, and not as that black bear and that weird looking chipmunk. They don’t have a ton of personalities, but they are sweet enough that you care about their well-being and actually want to help them.
We incidentally didn’t like the Stardew Valley co-op because you couldn’t really immerse yourself in the world when running around with another person. In Garden Paws it works because the setting is so weird. In our world, a chipmunk and a dragon, who are somehow the same size, run a Flowers & Pies shop. The RPG elements are also not as strong and the missions are fairly disconnected and simple, so it feels okay to split up the tasks, and nobody feels like they are missing out.
Have I mentioned how endearing this game is? There is even a Halloween maze.
It is relaxing, you can’t die or lose, your plants won’t wither when seasons change, nobody gets angry at you, everything is just nice and fun. That said, the game has loads of items and quests, so each day is an intricate puzzle, trying to figure out how to spend the day efficiently, trying to get as much done as possible. Even if nothing bad happens if you mess up.
Freedom to do…
There is really a crazy amounts of thing you can do, here is a list without even getting close to being complete:
- tame wild beetles and build them a poop house as habitat;
- take all the poop that the beetles collected for you for your crafting projects;
- craft flower bouquets;
- build ramps with which you can glide all over the place;
- churn butter;
- make fish traps;
- breed bunnies.
All these options give you a sense of freedom, you can try any and all of these and figure out which you like most.
I probably mentioned the cuteness factor of Garden Paws but it is so delightful that we actually ended up changing the decorations and our outfits with each season, e.g. bring out the Christmas décor for winter or put on sunglasses and a straw hat for summer.
The Bad
Unexpected
Surprisingly, placing things is kinda annoying. Building a house with even walls is near impossible, they somehow don’t align correctly. There are also hills everywhere, which means uneven surface, and the rotation of items is a bit of a mess. There is even a separate in-game item for doing that, which is weird.
The game is a bit buggy, but nothing serious. The biggest issue we have encountered is that when the second person joins the world the living room is all dark and it is difficult to get out of the house. But when you go back the lighting works fine, so it is only a minor inconvenience.
The dungeon is unfortunately boring. The levels are mostly the same, the strategy for clearing them is also the same. The wizard robes are cool though.
Some people might say that the game mostly consists of running up and down, and they wouldn’t be wrong. There are a lot of fetch quests and come back tomorrow type of situations. Some people will find it more annoying than others.
The little engine that struggled
The engine does not ramp up too much. Farming is pretty well thought out with the sprinklers and seed makers, but for example milking cows will be as inefficient thirty hours into the game is as it was after two hours. To be fair, new features are being added to the game constantly, so I expect these to improve with time. Or maybe we just haven’t gotten to the cow milking machine quest yet.
The weird atmosphere
This is only an issue for my partner in crime, he thinks that the game is too sweet with some Happy Tree Friends vibes.
The Co-Op
The co-operation in Garden Paws is really about splitting up the work. You’ll have to figure out who does what, who focuses on what, who takes care of which quest. And also sort of just living together on your farm.
It is very cute to run around together, exchanging clothing tips, surprising each other with new wallpaper or a pet bear.
The Recommendation
We do recommend Garden Paws, but not for people who want a challenge or a very real false sense of achievement from games. This game is for relaxing and for joyfully laughing at your partner as he spends his time running around as a hyperactive chipmunk harvesting a thousand pumpkins for his pie business and then bragging about how much money he made selling pumpkin pies to imaginary furry little animals.
Info
| Release Year | 2018 |
| Genre | Base Building |
| Difficulty | Very Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | We are at 57 hours, no end yet |
Rating
| Overall | Great |
| Story | Good |
| Co-Operation | Good |