Horticular: Build a Garden, Attract Wildlife

Scratches that Viva pinata itch.

Fun game. Not what I would consider "cozy". Rather frustrating actually. The game becomes much more fun after the little dudes unlock the ability to heal the animals for you, up until then it gets to be a lot of seemingly pointless clicking. I also wish the habitats would show you what they want/ are lacking because it really sucks the fun out when I feel like I have tried everything and I just can't seem to figure out what the dang thing wants and its stuck on 99%..... This is a game I play until it gets too annoying so I turn it off. But I keep coming back because I love cute "relaxing" animal / nature vibe games and there aren't very many that appeal to me that I haven't already played. Might as well get it if you have your eye on it

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't recommend the game until then either.

So cute, so fun. Was putting off playing it for a long time, I like the header picture change. I've been trying to stave off my craving to play Pokopia (I don't have a switch2) and I realised this game has similar gameplay and I love it more that it's animals that actually exist. I've seen a lot of comments comparing it to Zoo Tycoon, I loved that as a kid and they're right, I enjoy the simple graphics. Small critique, the UI is slightly finicky and I also often find I'm trying to zoom out only to enter the lot buying mode and it's quite jarring. I wish I could zoom out a little bit more. Absolutely hooked, very very enjoyable, because it's so simple it's refreshing to play a game that's not making my computer take off, and I hope there are updates in the future to keep me coming back.

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.

Extremely fun game to just relax and garden. Fun little challenges await the clever gardener. If you like building animal habitats, gardening, and decorating this is a must buy game.

It took a while to figure out how to have fun with this. The first 10 times I played were probably for less than an hour per session, ending in frustration. Once you unlock more upgrades, the QOL is much improved (especially dealing with sickness). I have a couple gripes: Corruption is ridiculously easy but for some reason takes an outrageous amount of time of staring at a dark garden. The upgrades for corruption only make it take longer for some reason. The habitats automatically placing themselves can be useful, but I wish you could delete them as needed. The signs that block animals from entering (frogs) is useful. But sometimes I am trying to place a habitat but the center I had planned will be occupied by a bumblebee or something. Overall, I’ve spent plenty of time on this game and can’t wait for some more DLC. It’s highly relaxing and requires only a simple level of puzzling. There’s also some excellent mods out there.

I really love this game. It's actually a little tricky to get good, but once you get the concept you get quite the hang of it. The story is cute and funny and whimsy. The artstyle is really cute and I really like how cozy it feels. A great game to play when you feel like collecting cuter creatures!