Luna's Fishing Garden

I loaded this game up just to try it out and wound up playing the whole thing. It's only a few hours long but it's wholesome, relaxing, and compelling.

Video Review (Featuring Capybaras In Little Hats): https://youtu.be/Edp0YE-ksdE

I Enjoyed:
+Delightful pixel art and relaxing music
+Calming, relaxing gameplay
+Two control styles (gamepad and mouse only)
+Gamepad controls are intuitive
+Two different fishing modes so you can choose your style
+You can also change the fishing speed to slow down the minigame (or speed it up for more challenge)
+Create plants which start an incremental gameplay loop where you gradually get more "magic leaves"
+Each fish has its own pattern for catching it
+Blathers-like character Nigel the parrot wants to catalogue all the items in the game
+The spirits are full of personality (my favorite is Gustav the gecko artist, arrogant and yet somehow likeable and charming)
+Quest system to keep you motivated
+Use capybaras and keas to help you gather water and land plants and auto-sell them, turning part of the game into an idle game where you can take a break and leave it running, then come back to riches a little while later
+The capybaras ride around in a delightful little boat
+Giant fish character is a crossover from their previous game (Merchant of the Skies) and the game has fun references to that
+AXOLOTLS!

Could Be Better:
-When you "sell" your items, it sells everything at once except for items you actively need for quests, so you can't keep items for Nigel (minor inconvenience)
-There are two control schemes but you can't manually rebind controls (limitation for some disabled players)
-Capybaras and keas harvest all items indiscriminately, so when you need a specific item you have to camp the plants for that item before they're auto-harvested

Overall, it's a fun little game I really enjoyed playing. If you like cute, wholesome, casual, low-stress games where you can pick your challenge level, you'll probably enjoy it too.

The game is nice, but very short indeed. I don't feel like recommending it. Maybe in a future with more upgrades .. but at the moment it is really too simple and short and not replayable

I have thought long and hard about whether to recommend this game or not, but I ultimately decided against it because of a few factors. Don't take this as a complete downvote though - more of a "mixed" review. (when will Steam allow this btw?)

The objective of the game is to row around in a magical boat, plant stuff on islands and in the water, fish up some stuff and restore life to the spirits. So far, so good, and the game definitely has some positive aspects. The storyline is simple, the pixel art is well done and the one music track playing on loop is relaxing and not too annoying.

Those positives aside, the main problem of the game is in the game play, or the lack thereof. To progress, you need leaves (the currency) and timber in the late game. You can plant trees or put things in the water to gather leaves. Then you sell them. Some NPCs are there that give you quests to collect certain things. The rewards are absolutely pitiful - after just half an hour you will have more leaves than you know what to do with, and this extremely underutilized currency is not used for much aside from planting new things. Getting 300 leaves from an NPC when you have already several thousand is not doing much in that case.

Fishing is also not really that fun. There are several methods of fishing to choose between, which is great, but there just is not much variety. You cant do much with them except sell them, use them for a few quests or record them in a book. You get one fishing rod at the beginning that is extremely cheap to upgrade and then that is that.

After less than 3 hours, the main storyline of the game is over and you are done. There is nothing left to do in this game, nothing to work towards, nothing to enjoy. Completing the main storyline is as easy as planting one of every resource gatherer in the game, hiring two or three helpers and then sitting around afk for a while until you have everything you need, with the exception of gathering a few fish. It is not only extremely short, but it also doesn't feel like much of a game, as you are not really *doing* anything aside from gathering fish. The more the game goes on, the less there is to do thanks to the helpers automating everything except fishing, and the shortness of the game tells you everything there is to know about how little there is to do. It is *extremely* shallow. You also move around very slowly and can't upgrade the boat speed until the game is almost over.

For the price, I would definitely recommend against it. On sale for 4 or 5 dollars, it might be a somewhat easier purchase, but even then there just isn't much to see here. The gameplay is almost nonexistent and if you just want to look at some pretty pixel art, there are better and cheaper ways to do so. In my 2.5 hours of playing the game, I did not feel accomplished, or relaxed, or even amused - I just felt bored. I have absolutely nothing against casual games - I love them, in fact - but even the most casual games have more depth than Luna's Fishing Garden. A game should be entertaining and, well, a game - and I did not feel like LFG accomplished that. Sadly, I have to give it a thumbs down, but if you get it for really, really cheap (50 % off or more) it may still be worth a look, if just for some pretty art.