53 hours played, 75% of achievements completed, story completed, all on easy difficulty.
PROS
- The vibe, the world, the exploring-gardening gameplay are awesome.
CONS
- Could have used a bit more time for performance optimization. My laptop can usually run AAA titles mid quality 1080p at 60 frames minimum, sometimes even on 2560p. This one I played through on 15-20 fps on lowest settings. I get it, modelling water, sand, and especially leaves are incredibly calculation-demanding. But if my job is to build huge gardens with enormous trees and long irrigation canals, they should work reasonably well, and should not take 15-20s for every plant to pop in after teleporting to a location...
- Same tweaking could go into the UI as well. Like there are a ton of nice small features like animals and NPC stopping when you're near them so you don't have to chase them through the wasteland. But the plant, animal and item "hitboxes" are terrible and since most of the time you want to interact with a plant, pick up an item, or talk to your pet, it's very annoying having to do the hitbox-finder dance. Even though you have a targeting cursor that works perfectly in combat, but is completely ignored by the friendly targeting. Or that you have a very useful map with everything being shown, you can pin locations, create new ones. But the teleport locations only show a dumbed down version of this map, where you don't see any of the exctra markers, any of your notes, any of your highlights when you have to decide which of the 50 teleport location you want to travel. Or that there is a Journal for the quests, and they fairly often show you the relevant locations on the map. But other times they don't, for example graves and ghosts revealed by your shine disappear from your map after a while and you end up with a quest that references an unknown location, and there's no way for you to ever find it again.

These are minor problems, but they are continuously present, so fixing these would help a ton in the quality of the game.

But make no mistake, the game is very good for what it is: a charming, mystical, post-apocalyptic eco-restoration game with the occasional combat. Of course, as with every unique game, you will have to be in the right mood to be immersed, but if you got that, the game will give you 50-100 hours (depending on the fully customizable dfficulty) enjoyment.

I love this game! It is so relaxing while still having enough of a challenge to keep it engaging for me. Being able to slowly change the desert into a beautiful garden/forest is so satisfying! I don't have a lot of time for video games right now. But when I do I boot up this game because it is such a wonderful way to unwind and take my mind off all the stress.

I will agree that the game could use a little polishing, but you can see the attention and care that the development team is putting into this game right down to the little details and I truly hope it continues!

Very relaxing, well thought out game that gives you hope for the world despite the tattered planet you are dropped into. The power of water, plants, and heart really shines through. It makes my completionist heart happy to with all the variants of plants and grafting combos, and the most fun I have had is once I was able to carry large trees and fix my poorly planned layout and stratigize. There are some quirks, and quests that are hard to follow/ figure out, and I think the tracking system could use improvement. But overall a job well done and keeps me immersed every time I launch the game.