Voodoo Garden

+++ 100 % Steam Achievements but it takes 10 or more Hours

++ 6 Trading Cards (5 would be perfect) but still super/ very good

-- very Grinding Game / no Help Functions/ Special Abilities, only the slow Animals

Good for Achievement Hunters & Trading Card Collectors

Did that bat take a beehive?!?

Ready to tend to your lush farmland? Welcome to the swamp your hut sits on as it is ripe to grow plants to harvest. But, you don't exactly sell what you harvest. Armed with a few recipes, the various critter parts, fruits, leaves, and so on can be combined to make various voodoo items to sell.

Armed with only a few plants, you work up your way up to getting more access to different plants and recipes with each level up. Three lanes are available to plant, the top for trees, middle for bushes, and the bottom for herbs. The beginning plants cost a decent amount but the more advanced ones will cost a lot, with the upgrades increasing the price. But these do contain ingredients for products that sell for higher price than what you start out with. As you get more and more plants you can plant, you will eventually lose space in front of your hut so it will be time to expand. Of course the price will increase with every expansion, but more space equals more cash. I do recommend putting ghosts on the expansions, as you will need to scroll to the side at this point, but I do believe bats only bother plants on your current screen.

Various animals will walk through your garden as they can also provide some ingredients. Of course, more variety will pass through as you level up as even lizards and dragonflies will eventually visit. But be careful of the bats! They will have no mercy to steal from yur garden! I believe the bats will link up to your spirits, as they will not take the mushrooms and bogroots until the spirits can. These will most likely be the ingredients you will be short of the most, including the beehives bees will leave behind. Luckily, there are ways to get more to spawn in forms of totems. Each totem having their own design to correspond to what they will attract when lit. Sadly these come way too apart. Snakes will be one of the earliest animals you need a lot of, but the totem for them don't become available till to 20s levels.

An inventory is available, with limitations set. You have a set amount of each you can take in, with an upgrade increasing it, and once you try to harvest past it, those will be sold for one coin. Giving you a hint that you shouldn't buy anymore of those plants if you keep with having more than you can carry.

But hey, you will not be the only one that can harvest. You can buy animals, starting with a rabbit before you unlock more by leveling up, that you can fatten up by feeding them their prefered food. But if this is going to take resources away from you, why do it? Permitting that you have available spots, you will get a prompt to sacrifice the animal once it is fully fattened up to turn them into a spirit. Forever slaved to your garden as they have to pick the various plants for you. This excludes the mushrooms and bogroots until you get the upgrade. If you place them by the plants they ate, they will also get a boost in growth speed. With the upgrades going to their plucking speeds.

So later game brings you to only needing to scare off bats and picking animal parts once the spirits come in to help. What else can there be? It will occasionally rain, making spirits disappear and animals stop coming around. Even the totems will be put out due to the rain, nullifying their affects. Making you pluck everything yourself on a moment's notice to spice it up a bit. Before you know it, the rain will stop and everything will come back.

Voodoo Garden leaves you to your own devices without a tutorial or what anything does. I do wish it gave some indication of the different aspects, especially when your plants (and those who will be planted there) can diminish in production. It only took a while that bees planted a beehive there and noticed that bees are your savior, where previously I kinda freaked out thinking it would forever block the space as there were no recipes calling for beehives at that time.

Now this is not an idle game. While it does have idle aspects, Voodoo Garden is very much a clicker game and will only continue collecting and growing if it is running. With spirits helping out, you only need to click the bats and the animals walking by the plants, and even than there are recipes that do only require plant items.

Overall

+ Great visuals
+ Music
+ Simple

- Can get old, as there is no motivations other than to continue

For a game that I bought just because I liked Viridi, it really grew on me. It really is a great game to just zone out for a while and look at their colorful visuals and hear the music. If you're an achievement hunter, they will be easy to get by just playing through once. I hope you make a prosperous garden.

When I first got this game I really enjoyed it. It has good music, it's cute, and I liked having my own little garden and spirits to help around. After a few hours, I felt done with the game, but I couldn't really leave it with achievements unfinished. It took me 33 hours to finally get all of them. While this game has some good points, I don't find them good enough to really recommend this game to others.

The good aspects are as I said, good music, cute game, as well as what I suppose is generally a decent concept. It's a good game for achievment hunters because if you're dedicated, you could finish them all in less time than what I took considering I wasn't paying attention 100% of the time. It helps that your spirits can help pick things like mushrooms up, so the 6666 mushrooms achievement isn't as intimidating as it seems. You can also play this game while not completely paying attention to it, allowing this game to be a good side thing if say you're doing something else or waiting for another thing to finish, you can just do some clicking around on this game in the meantime without worrying about saving progress or anything of the sort.

The not so good parts of this game include all of the clicking (one of the achievements including clicking 2000 dragonflies). A chunk of the ingredients needed to make certain recipes in order to get coins requires you to click the creatures that run/fly/etc across your screen. The coins are of importance, as they allow you to buy more plants, expand your garden, etc. which all help you level up in the long run. I also found that this game became a little tedious after a few hours and I didn't really want to continue it. I sort of reluctantly did finish it (on the side of doing other things, as I don't believe this game is one that you could just sit and completely focus your attention on without getting bored) for the part of me that needed this game to be completed before given up on. Lastly, the biggest down side to this game is that I feel like it doesn't have that much replay value. Other games you can playthrough again for different experiences or to try different styles of play, etc. With this game though, I feel like once you play through it once, if you play through again it's just the same old thing.

Honestly, I don't believe that this game is worth what it costs. I've played better games for much cheaper. I'm glad I got to experience it, but if I were given another opportunity to purchase a game like this for the price that it's at, I wouldn't do it again.