• Price: $29.99 USD (digital & physical)
• Developer: Freetime Studio
• Publisher: SOEDESCO
• Release Date: September 12, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by SOEDESCO on behalf of Freetime Studio. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Note: This is an updated review based on the 1.0.19 update for Garden Witch Life from *after* the game’s launch.

Life can be incredibly stressful, so sometimes we need to just take a break and enjoy a chill, cozy game like Garden Witch Life. The story begins with our character experiencing relatable stress and anxiety due to a major upheaval in their life, but they’re soon offered a chance to live in an abandoned treehouse and take care of the land surrounding it.

The soil quality has deteriorated over the years, making the land inhospitable to animals and most plant life. You’ll have to fix the problem, starting small with only a few plants in your garden as you bring the land back to life.

There’s a neat “companion plant” system, with your crops influencing each other positively, negatively, or in a neutral way. Crops with positive associations are healthier and require less water nutrients, while competing plants require more of each. I thought it was an interesting system. My only issue with the crops was that it could be a little difficult to see if I’d watered them sometimes.

Besides growing plants, you’ll also need to cut some down to gather materials for crafting purposes. Chop down trees to craft planks for building projects, and gather some nettles to use in the recipes you’ve unlocked.

Once you’ve revitalized the land enough, you’ll see animals start to return. I ran into a frog, a chicken, some bunnies, and even a snail at one point! Bees also buzzed onto my property. Convince the animals to stay with you by building them places to stay and offering them food. I absolutely love how adorable these critters are – I just had a lot of trouble figuring out how/where to place food.

The interior of your new home starts out as a mess too. You need to clear out a lot of debris before you can truly make it your own. At the beginning of the game you’re able to customize your character’s appearance from their skin color to their clothes, and you can make changes from inside your house later on.

You can also craft or purchase new decor for your home. The wallpapers were really cute. But I had an issue with the user interface for decorating, as I had a hard time placing furniture where I wanted to.

There didn’t seem to be an option to rotate the items I was trying to place, so it was kind of awkward. On the plus side, the game doesn’t use a grid for placing decor, so you can place things a bit more freely.

I did have a couple of difficulties with the crafting system; for one thing, we can’t craft using items from storage, so you have to go digging through your many chests to see where you put the materials you need. I was also a little overwhelmed by the amount of materials I had to gather for many of the crafting/cooking recipes.

Even just trying to get something as simple as iron bars, I’d have to first provide the store with the necessary ore and the money for them. I wish we had the option to either craft them ourselves or buy them without supplying the materials. I felt the same way about having to craft all of the animal food ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong – I love crafting systems in games. But I just felt like the recipes needed to be simplified, with less material requirements. The cooking recipes are the main offenders here, with some early recipes requiring 6 ingredients. Recipes like the nettle soup even ask for several of the same ingredient when I felt like my resources were limited.

If you actually manage to get your hands on the ingredients for a dish, the cooking process itself is kind of fun. You actually get to dice tomatoes in a simple little “mini game,” and dump ingredients in the cauldron and stir them together. I was happy that it didn’t involve a mini game with complicated controls.

Now, what I really liked about the crafting system was how we can unlock new recipes by picking up new ingredients/materials. A cute little lock even appears on the screen and makes sounds when you unlock new recipes. I’m used to just buying new recipes or having someone hand one to me, so it was neat to have the ideas unlock more organically.

You can create a few new items without a recipe, too. The loading screens display roses growing on a trellis; to achieve this look, you must place trellises on your land and then plant something that will “climb” them like roses. That is such a cool feature to have, and I don’t remember seeing something like that in a game before.

Of course, you need to go into town to purchase the seeds for that, and you can also sell anything you’ve grown. You can either place your wares in the community box, which is slower but offers more money, or you can sell items more quickly for less money at the MagiBuy Station at the port.

I wish it showed us how much we would make before selling at either location. Additionally, I felt like I had a really hard time making money in this game. My crops never seemed to turn much of a profit even after the update.

As such, it was hard for me to give decent gifts to my new neighbors. I lucked out with roses for Lyra and honeycombs for Lily, but other than that I had trouble figuring out good gifts that would give more than 10 affection points.

I did like the townspeople, as they all seem really nice, and have such varied yet colorfully cute designs. May and Aurel are probably my favorites. When something new happens with the townspeople, the dialogue is fun. I like that we don’t have a silent protagonist, and there seems to be a focus on self care.

On my trips into town every day though, I don’t think they have much to say. It was a little sad to see that May’s bakery is always empty, with no customers anywhere. There also isn’t much movement around town besides one or two characters. I would have liked to have seen a more active town.

When it comes to exploring the areas around town, I wish we got more direction on where to go and what to do. There were several days where I wouldn’t have any quests to complete besides my daily routine of watering my plants and visiting town.

There are areas like a mine and the “Fairy Forest,” which I explored and got further along with those quest/storylines. I had a hard time navigating a lot of these areas – especially the forest with its thick fog, making it impossible to see where I need to go. The recent update did thankfully change the map to make it display the location of the townspeople; I just need a more detailed topographic map.

I think Garden Witch Life is a very chill game without any real urgency, which is a good thing for a cozy game. Personally, I need a little more structure and guidance even in a cozy game, with more explicit tutorials from the start. But I like a lot of different things about this game despite my criticism.

The team has clearly been working hard to make improvements to the game, with the recent update removing the entire fatigue mechanic due to player feedback. They’ve indicated that they plan to “continue to listen to the community and work on new content updates,” and also “add more new quests for clearer guidance and a better feeling of progression.”

I’m hopeful that Garden Witch Life will continue to “grow” from here!