FingerGaming

Rating:

• Price: $2.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0.0
• Official Site: Snappy Touch

Flower Garden isn’t the kind of game I would normally play. As much as I respect the simulation genre, I generally don’t have the patience for games that require a large up-front investment of time and attention. In this case, though, stepping outside of my gaming comfort zone paid off. Flower Garden is a gardening simulator that demands little of your patience but offers a surprisingly compelling experience.

Flower Garden’s narrow focus is perhaps its greatest asset. You begin the game with 12 flower pots. You’re able to plant a different bag of seeds in each one. Successfully growing flowers rewards you with more seed packets, each of which contains a new type of flower.

Caring for the flowers is easy. Holding a button in the upper-right corner of the screen allows you to pour water into each pot. Some flowers will wilt if they’re overwatered, though, while others need to maintain a minimum amount of water to grow. It’s important to note that water is absorbed in real time — you’ll need to check in with your flowers daily (sometimes twice a day) to make sure that they’re getting enough water.

Flower Garden’s gameplay essentially boils down to keeping your flowers properly watered until they fully grow. That’s it. And that simplicity is where Flower Garden shines — I’m daunted by the genre’s typical responsibilities of running cities and managing civilizations, but I can definitely spare a few minutes a day to water flowers.

The presentation quality makes Flower Garden’s gameplay all the more satisfying. Your gardening is accompanied by the soothing ambient sounds of chirping birds and pottery gently scraping across pavement. The flowers themselves are beautifully rendered, and billow realistically in the game’s simulated breeze. Simply booting the game up provides instant relaxation.

Flower Garden also features an interesting social aspect to its gameplay. The flowers that you grow can be trimmed and placed into a virtual bouquet, which you can e-mail to your friends and family members. The gesture is more heartfelt than your average greeting card, since sending a Flower Garden bouquet involves the personal investment of growing, pruning, and arranging the flowers yourself.

Unfortunately, the bouquet screen is where the game’s technology trips over itself slightly; flowers will often clip through one another unless you arrange them carefully. I also found that keeping track of which flowers I had grown was difficult at times, since there’s no option to label the flower pots. Other than these minor issues, though, I had no frustrations with the rest of Flower Garden’s gameplay.

Flower Garden encapsulates the best parts of the simulation genre while avoiding its pitfalls. The daily responsibility aspect of its gameplay made me want to keep coming back to unlock more flowers, and the presentation quality is uniquely charming. It may not offer the type of gameplay you would normally expect from the simulation genre, but Flower Garden is a relaxing and absorbing experience all its own.

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Exclusive unlockable content alert! Snappy Touch designer Noel Llopis is rewarding FingerGaming readers with a special unlockable flower type in Flower Garden. Enter the “Seeds” menu, scroll to the bottom, and touch the padlock icon in the lower-left corner (if the icon isn’t there, unlock a few more of the in-game seed types first). Enter the unlock code “fingergaming” to receive the Summer Fingers flower, as seen in the screenshots above. It’s purple!

Tags: flower garden, reviews, simulation, snappy touch