My Tiny Garden

I wish I could give this game a neutral review. It was just released, has a lot of potential, and the dev appears active, so I will reevaluate after the next major update. As it stands now, there are more cons for me than pros.

Pros:
* The graphics are adorable.
* The drone that can care for plants is relatively easy to unlock. I think it took me about 4 hours of semi-constant play.
* The mechanic of tending plants and gathering coins myself works fine.
* The dev appears to be responsive to feedback and bug reports.

Cons:
* The only customization options are the pots. There is only one plant at each price level with a random chance of getting rare variants. The rare variants can earn more money, but still dry out and stop generating money after about 5 minutes, the same as the non-rare plants. There are no customization options for the cat or house.
* I have had issues with the drone freezing and stopping work. (The dev did push a patch shortly after I reported it, so my drone is less glitchy now. Thanks, Dev!)
* I do not understand the drone's task prioritization system. My drone's favorite task appears to be spraying bugs at the expense of letting other plants die. The bugs are relentless. Maybe a timer to make them less frequent would make my drone less obsessed with them. (In the time it took to write and proofread this, my drone let 4 of my 20 plants die.)
* Plants dry out and their coin generation pots fill at about 5 minutes. The drone cares for the plants (mostly), but it does not collect coins, so if you want enough coins to unlock the next plant, you need a lot of plants and to check them about every 5 minutes. I wish they collected coins for at least 20 minutes, the length of of a Pomodoro timer. 5 minutes is too little time to do something else, but in between the 5 minutes, there is too little to do in-game. An upgrade system for longer collection times could work, too, but I would prefer a longer collection time from the beginning.
* There are no accessibility settings that I could find for image size, font size or style, or colors.
* I couldn't find a tutorial, so my first game started with "click everything and see what happens". I finally found the button to hide the plants behind other windows by clicking on the hammer, then the thumbtack, but the game doesn't remember my settings from the last session, so I need to click the thumbtack every time I open it.

I can't recommend it as-is

- Seriously needs optimizations if it's to be on par with other idle games
- The UI becomes unresponsive at times
- The graphics (both right-click contextual menu and plants) become squished looking randomly
- It's a slog to even get to the 3rd plant, with lack of customizations in general
- Bugs are hard to see at times because my desktop background is dark
- Even achievements are glitched...I unlocked the planted 10 plants + 1k coins collected just by starting the game, so....

There's just not a lot going on here, both in customizations and rate of dopamine hits on unlocks until automation. Combine that with the glitchy/sometimes unresponsive UI and poor optimization...you're better off getting other idling games such as the animal onsen spa, the restaurant + farm game (which lets you customize and name your NPCs), etc.

Skip this one.

The game is really cute and I love the artstyle and how it looks on my desktop. But (early on at least) it's not the most casual idler game I've played, and is more of a clicker game that requires you to be near enough constantly active to maintain your plants.

You buy plants to generate coins, and they require different types of care or they'll die and stop generating more coins. The plants can be revived again by getting their care bars back up to full, so that's nice!

I've noticed the timers for when plants require care are REALLY low, which is a bit frustrating once you start getting more plants, I wont lie. Generally with idle games I like being able to get up and leave my PC for 10-15 minutes and knowing that I can come back, collect coins and upgrade my stuff a bit. With this game if you look away from it for 5-10 minutes all your plants will die lol.

There is an "Automation Drone" that you can buy for 100 gems, but gems seem to take a loongg time to get. I'm not sure if this drone would make caring for plants 100% automated, or if it just collects coins, but from the trailer it looks like it cares for the plants as well.

So far I'm about 3 hours in and have a total of 30 gems, so I assume it's going to take at least another 6 hours before I can fully automate the game with the drone, which isn't really ideal imo for a game that's meant to be a casual idler that sits on your desktop whilst you do other things.

As of right now I wouldn't wholeheartedly recommend this game if you're looking for something that you can actually leave idle whilst you work, or play another game, or watch something. But if you want something you can open here and there, click around a bit, grow some cute plants, then close again, then its a fun little time sink to have.