Summary:
Pros: Frantic gameplay after the first couple levels. Great art style. Pretty challenging to get gold for more gamer-y gamers. Not as "linear" as some might make it out to be in terms of gameplay.

Cons: Soundtrack is droll and repetitive (turned the music off after 3 levels). Could have added a little more identification of clickables in the busy background art (I might just suck at the game as well and blame not having an attention span).

For a casual game it is actually pretty good. The basic mechanic is that you have to decide in which order you are going to click things in order to achieve maximum efficiency. It sounds like this might be rather simple and the first couple of levels are (tutorial levels essentially). But after a few levels the difficulty ramps up if you are trying to achieve a gold rating on each level. I have only managed to get a gold on the tutorial levels >.<.

I was actually suprised at how frantic the game can feel. You are constantly looking at the time and trying to speed things up in order to get that gold rating.

The reward for completing levels is money which can be used to fancy up your house, though this felt rather lame as it is essentially just a still frame picture that you are slowly turning from a crap house into a decent house with a good garden. I have not finished the game yet so maybe you get some super cool cinematic at the end, but I don't think that this was necessary and I would rather have had a little bit in the way of story instead of making a prettier picture.

As far as gameplay I only have one real complaint and that is the fact that it is hard to notice when the resources come out. Maybe it is just cause I suck at the game and don't notice but there isn't any flashy visual cue that shows when your tools or wood have restocked. What happens is that the little guys working at the huts stop moving and the resource appears but this is usually lost to me with all the other running arounds and what not. I just wish they had put in a glow around the clickables or something as more of a reminder. There is a slight audio cue but it is lost in the extremely short repetitive music that gets stuck in my head, but in a bad way.

I recommend this game for slightly more than casual gamers because of the frenetic nature of it, but I would recommend turning off the music after a couple of levels as it gets too distracting while trying to listen to the audio clues. All of the downsides are rather small quibbles and I would still recommend picking this up.

Playing status: finished the game with gold medals in all levels

Gardens Inc. – From Rakes to Riches is a time management game where you have to tend a garden of someone else's house. The game has 50 levels with varying objectives.

Pros:
- 50 levels
- Additional objective to add more variation to the gameplay

Cons:
- It's hard to tell if you successfully cancel an action

Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Yes.
If you like time management games, buy this game.

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If you have played time management games before, the visuals won't be that much different. The in-game screen will be presented in top-down view with a lot of small buildings that are connected with paths and obstacles in between. The cutscenes, however, look neat with their painting-like style. I like how they use so few images on the cutscene and animate them to make them "move". It'll zoom in on the person that is currently talking and zoom out whenever it wants to give a bigger picture of the situation. The interface is also simple enough to understand.

I'm surprised that there is a story in this game. There will be some cutscenes after several levels and an excerpt of it in each level. There might be some fantasy element in it, which doesn't fit the realistic part of the story, but everything is concluded nicely in the end. I found the story to be solid, especially with the writing.

Gameplay
Each level in Gardens Inc. – From Rakes to Riches has a different set of objectives to complete. However, the mechanics are mostly the same. You need to destroy the obstacles blocking your way, build something to get resources, and plant flowers. There is also an optional objective in addition to the mandatory objective which will give an additional bonus if it was completed. The objective usually revolves around the color of the flowers that you need to plant, although it'll usually be told in riddles. You need to figure out what the game means from the given hint to solve it.

The control seems to be simplified to make it approachable for casual players. At some point, you'll control more than one worker at once. However, the action that you assign will apply to all workers. Since you can't order workers to break an obstacle in front of the obstacle that they are working on, you'll be bound to select the other reachable obstacles in between or risk having idle workers. I found it to be inefficient to see the workers going from the far left to the far right of the screen because they are following the next command list whenever I didn't time their task completion time right.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1258846571

The game isn't all about gardening though. Sometimes, the story will send you to another level that is quite different from the other. Instead of tending a garden, you will have to either do a stealth game or solve a puzzle. It will still be played in top-down view with the same control scheme as the other levels, but it helps to break the repetitiveness sometimes.

Length and Difficulty
I finished the game in 11h. The game is easy to finish even if you want to get gold medals on all levels. The optional objective might be tricky to solve, but you don't need to complete them to finish the game.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1148451514

As a genre that is geared for casual players, time management games tend to be on the easier side, which I always appreciate whenever I wanted to take a break and play a different kind of game. Gardens Inc. – From Rakes to Riches does a good job with that. It is simple enough to understand and the difficulty is just right. Those who want to play the game without caring about the gold medals can do that just fine, while those who want a bit of challenge can attempt it without getting mad with the difficulty. The relaxing music helps to enjoy the levels and the level are varied enough to keep you entertained. If you are looking for a time management game to buy, you should buy this game.

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Gardens Inc. is an incredibly challenging time management game that offers both interesting and infuriating gameplay elements for those who want something they cannot just casually breeze through.

Gardens Inc. may look colourfully cute and innocent, but this time management game is downright relentless and significantly more challenging than the graphics suggest.

The game achieves this difficulty with some great and some terrible ideas. The core concept is simple, we use 1-3 workers who gather basic resources to do gardening work, but mostly to just weed out the path and renovate production buildings. This is why all stages try to introduce a secondary goal or a quirk like turning the level goal time itself into a spendable resource, to keep this recipe fresh. However, it was inevitable that some of these ideas get annoying—especially when their sole purpose is to deliberately waste time.

Still, among the troublesome elements—like the incredibly slow rafts or the ages it takes to generate some money for the workers—lies a fun time manager. A fun time manager that will make you want to smash your monitor during some stages.

Funny little casual game. I hoped it was more open (like Hero Of The Kingdom) but instead its very linear where you have to follow a specific path while completing objectives. The goal is to restore other people's gardens and that way earn money to help your grandparents keep their home.

File this one under 'time management'. If you like those kind of games try Chocolatier instead. It's better in my opinion, but this one isn't bad either.

[Rating: 70/100]

If you like time management games with rebuilding villages and houses, you will love this game. The game is about rebuilding people's gardens in order to get money to save your grandparents out of dept. The art design of each lvl is wonderfull. Each lvl has a bonus task and it's up to you to figure out how to solve it. Watch out for that fishy mafia looking guy!

Edit: After completing the game I have to say I was pleased with the purchase. I was very surprised to hear that people found it hard, but then again this is also the genre I play the most. I didn't have any trouble completing each lvl with gold time (expert time). So as a conclusion: the game might be hard if you're not very used to the genre, but if you are used to it, you won't feel bored. :)

Gardens Inc. - From Rakes to Riches is a time management game developed by World-Loom / Nitreal.


Jill's grandparents are about to lose their house to the scheming millionaire Cliff Gold. The girl decides to thwart the unscrupulous tycoon and win the grand prize in a prestigious gardening competition in Sunnydale. To win, Jill must become the best gardener in town. But that is easier said than done. She must efficiently allocate the resources of her newly formed company, properly manage her time and the time of her employees, fight pests and even catch ghosts! Your path to success will be through Sunnydale's five boroughs, each with their own unique challenges.


+ Support of different operating systems
+ solid graphics and sound
+ interesting characters
+ various difficulties, not too easy and not too difficult
+ many levels that offer a good number of hours of game time
+ same game mechanics as in other games


- gets boring with time
- not a good story


Gardens Inc. - From Rakes to Riches has many secrets to discover and is fun, if mindless.



Gardens Inc. – From Rakes to Riches ist ein Zeitmanagementspiel, welches von World-Loom/Nitreal entwickelt wurde.


Jills Großeltern sind dabei, ihr Haus an den intriganten Millionär Cliff Gold zu verlieren. Das Mädchen beschließt, die Pläne des skrupellosen Industriemagnaten zu vereiteln und den Hauptpreis in einem prestigeträchtigen Gartenwettbewerb in Sunnydale zu gewinnen. Um zu gewinnen, muss Jill die beste Gärtnerin der Stadt werden. Aber das ist leichter gesagt als getan. Sie muss ihrer neu gegründeten Gesellschaft effizient die Ressourcen zuteilen, ihre Zeit und die Zeit ihrer Mitarbeiter richtig verwalten, Schädlinge bekämpfen und sogar Geister fangen! Ihr Weg zum Erfolg führt durch die fünf Bezirke von Sunnydale, die jeweils ihre eigenen, einzigartigen Herausforderungen bergen.


+ Unterstützung verschiedener Betriebssysteme
+ solide Grafik und Sound
+ interessante Charaktere
+ verschiedene Schwierigkeiten, nicht zu leicht und nicht zu schwer
+ viele Level, die eine gute Anzahl von Stunden Spielzeit bieten
+ gleiche Spielmechanik wie bei anderen Spielen


- wird mit der Zeit Langweilig
- keine gute Geschichte


Gardens Inc. – From Rakes to Riches bietet dir viele Geheimnisse zu entdecken und macht Spaß, wenn auch geistlos.

A good challenge for time management game fans. Each chapter adds new elements and mechanics to keep things interesting. The later levels introduce time as a resource. There's not only bonuses to extend your level time, but sometimes you can choose between taking a time penalty to open up shortcuts or running the long way around, or exchange time for extra resources and vice versa, which quickly becomes a difficult balancing act. It's a mechanic I've never seen before, and it adds complexity and strategic thinking to the relatively simple time management formula. My only complaint is that clicking on moving objects can be finicky, so levels with lots of thieves are a real pain.

I was given this game to make me stop wining about waiting for other games. At first I was like yay another casual game bleh. I did the first level and was like I hate this game. Since it was a gift I gave it 2 more levels to make sure I hated it. I'm 20 levels in now and I still hate it; I'm also still playing it.

This game is deceptively hard. Let me say that again, this game is hard! Trying for gold every level is almost painful. I'm ending up doing all the levels twice or three times just to be 2 seconds off the gold time. They say this is a time management game, and they are totally correct. At first you think you can just queue a bunch of stuff up and win, and you might, but you wont get gold for the level. Then you realize you really have to micro manage your time and your little helpers. Another reviewer said this game is frantic, I believe this is the best word to describe it.

As a side note there's no actual gardening in game, unless you consider click a predefined space and selecting a flower as gardening.

The story its self is very generic for casual game; house is going to be repo'd if we don't get the money in time! Oh there is a contest where the prize is the exact amount of money we need! If we fix the house up we can win and pay off the house in time! Never mind the fact that fixing up the house costs about the same amount of money to that you need to pay off the house.

Overall I give this game a thumbs up because I went from hating this game because it was a dumb casual game with no actual gardening to hating it because it's frantic and very hard. I'm not completely sure you can call it a casual game there is a lot of strategy that goes into playing this one.

A nice time waster micro management game like hundred others - until it introduces ghosts as part of the game mechanics. Spirits that appear at random intervals in random places on the map. You have a ghost buster to counter it but it does not keep the ghosts from spawning. Problem is, any ghost - even at the far end of the map - will make your workers stop doing anything and run home. Since you cannot control the event it is all down to a gamble. Either you get lucky or ghosts will halt all work and make you lose lost of time. Well, I can live with getting only silver ratings and the levels are still beatable, that's not it. But it is downright frustrating and unnerving to see your micro management go down the sh*thole due to random events. That is not how it should work. I'll probably keep playing it but I do not recommend it.

Keeping it brief:

At 12hrs I have finished the game but didn't get my mansion completed (just not quite enough gold)

Some levels I got gold level easy without trying, others I am having issues with.

I class this as strategy, not sim because you get very little real choice on what to do. There are set paths and the only real choice you get is to upgrade a shack or what colour plants to put in....

Enjoyed and I will give the second one a crack. What a nice "time waster" that had me swearing when I looked up and realised I had been ther for 7hrs and it was 3am ;)