Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator (Nintendo Switch) Review

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator on the Nintendo Switch is a technical disaster of a port. It sets the scene immediately, as you go from a beautiful loading screen – a capture presumably taken from the PC version – into a blurry, chugging mess that only gets worse as your garden expands. The frame-rate often dropped to single digits and I’d argue it became unplayable – not that Nintendo or their archaic refund policy would care. It’s a depressing outcome as while Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is not particularly novel in the genre, it’s perfect for short sessions on the Switch, with a charming premise, a cathartic gameplay loop, and minimal time pressure.

There’s a free-form mode that lets you create and tend to a garden without any narrative-based progression blockers, but I found the story mode added some much-needed motivation and gave me time to learn the ropes. You take up the role of a new community gardener, after the sudden and tragic passing of the couple that tended to it for years. The rest of the community, whom want to integrate the garden into all aspects of village life, guide you at first – and then start making incessant demands.

The villagers you assist are diverse, albeit somewhat cliched by modern standards – think “quirky” in ways you’ve seen a hundred before. That said, some narrative context adds a lot to games designed around busywork and time management. There’s a wedding planner planning their own wedding; a grieving sister establishing a memorial; an elderly nature-loving gym owner; another event planner; an eccentric grandmotherly shop owner; and even the ghost of the former gardener hoping you’ll complete her unfulfilled wishlist to grant her peace.

In gameplay terms, that means going through a daily routine while fulfilling both mandatory and optional tasks. The story-related tasks slowly expand your garden space as you restore a greenhouse and unlock new facilities in the village square, like a stall to sell excess plant materials and a memorial exhibition. Repetitive optional requests – which come thick and fast once you’ve met all of the villagers – make it easier to buy more seeds, tools, and decorations. As expanding both the number plant species and colour variants is essential, you’ll also need to keep an eye out for new seed mutations over time as you can’t find them all in the store.

As a gardening sim with progression and crafting elements, you’ll start by manually clearing weeds and dumping them in the compost bin; planting seeds, spreading fertilizer, and watering with a can you need to refill frequently; then you’ll collect flower cuttings, create bouquets, and use materials to craft flower trays or decorations at the crafting table. Once you’ve unlocked new facilities and earned enough florins – by completing tasks or flogging excess cuttings, bouquets, and seeds – you can automate many processes. Bug hotels keep insects off your plants, sprinkler systems keep them watered, and a little weeding machine churns out compostable waste once done with the weeds.

As your garden grows, time management becomes more of an issue than tending to it, as you find yourself running between storage shelves in the shed, multiple garden zones, the greenhouse, and the village square. Thankfully, Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator simplifies or ignores many real-world considerations. Days pass quickly and seasons change every 30 game-days, but there’s never a time-limit imposed on tasks. Flower cuttings and bouquets never wilt, so even if you mess up your garden layout, you can slowly build up the required amount rather than planning around a single harvest. Plants can die if you forget to water them or remove pests, but they also grow from seed within a day and sometimes bloom twice a day for harvesting.

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is ultimately a game about busywork and optimisation, just with the more frustrating time-management elements stripped out. There are some minor issues that build up over time – like how you always manage composting manually and can only ever collect flower cuttings slowly with secateurs – but the brisk pacing and ability to progress days with negligible consequences make them easier to gloss over. Or, at least, they would have been if basic gardening tasks were not impacted by the ever-worsening technical performance on the Nintendo Switch.

Between the cute premise, brisk gameplay loop, and budget pricing, I would recommend Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator on any other platform. On the Nintendo Switch, you get dynamic resolution scaling that turn some scenes into a smeared oil painting. The plants can look great up close – useful for learning how to identify common species – but they switch to 2D sprites within a few meters; sprites that don’t even accurately reflect the state of the plant. Then there’s the frame-rate that chugs so hard, I found the optimal way to harvest flower cuttings was to stand over them, aim the camera at the floor, and mash the action button while wriggling around the thumbstick. I’m sure some will accept trading performance for portability, but it’s a real shame the best platform to play Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator on is the most compromised.

Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One/Series S|X, and PS4/5.