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.

As it stands I cannot recommend this game. Ive had the game crash on me at least 5 times. A further maybe 2 dozen times ive had to reopen the game because either the drone stops working or the game freezes. On top of this it isnt really very idle. The drone will NOT collect money for you, you have to constantly babysit the game or you will make no progress. The progress you do make feels overly slow and drab even for an "idle" game. To add even further, an achievement has been broken since launch and no word on a fix as of yet even though the devs said they wanted to push out a patch before the end of last month nearly 2 weeks ago. Also, the Gacha machine (once you unlock it) WILL give you duplicates, better pray to the RNG gods if you want everything. Unfortunately I will complete it (hopefully) since im a completionist, but buyers beware.

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.