March Assassination #2 (SG Win / PoP Pick)

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When I first booted Garden Story, I got the impression it would be a pretty average, generic little game. And while I'm not completely wrong, it turned out to have a lot more charm than I anticipated.

The basic gameplay loop of Garden Story is a mix of exploration, combat and resource-gathering. You use these resources to improve your village, which in turn unlocks better tools that make combat and resource-gathering more efficient. And it's in this interplay that you'll get hooked. At first you are overwhelmed by the amount of resources, the difficulty of the combat, and the number of locations available to you. Slowly, it all becomes familiar and trivial, and by the time you're getting used to your surroundings, the plot forces you to go to the next village and restart the process from scratch. It's a surprisingly effective loop, and I blazed through the game in a few days while having a lot of fun.

None of these gameplay modes is particularly deep. Resource gathering is mostly using the right tool at the right object, sleep for the object to respawn, repeat. Backpack and storage limits prevent you from doing too well here and forces you to keep coming back for more. Exploration is fun at first, but once you've mapped the areas, it is mostly gone, but the game gates you out of enough areas that you always have a new carrot to pursue. Combat is simple, but different enemies require different tools to deal with and prevent you from zoning out. The use of estus flask for healing and staming management give the whole thing a Souls-lite flavor, and some bosses can even be difficult the first time around.

There's light gardening and base-building and crafting and daily missions and library-cataloguing and upgrade trees for your weapons and for your healing and for your repair box, and NPC favors, and just a lot of modern systems that games throw at us, and I think that's why I dismissed this game at first. But having 100% it, it does a pretty good job with all these systems and is well worth buying at full price in my opinion.