A Tale in the Garden Review: A Beautiful Yet Bittersweet Experience

I’ve played a few games involving gardens and gardening, such as The Sims, Animal Crossing, Botany Manor, and Garden Trills. Perhaps that’s what drew me to A Tale in the Garden, a short narrative point-and-click game incorporating gardening as a mechanic. A while ago, I played the demo, which allowed me to try out the gardening aspect but also touching on the story. As it turned out, the gardening and the story go hand-in-hand. 

A Tale in the Garden isn’t merely a cozy gardening game, but also contains a heartrending story with a surprise twist. This game isn’t one to be overlooked.

A Tale in the Garden is available on Steam for $4.99. A demo is also available if you want to try out the game for free.

Story – A Garden of Mystery

A Tale in the Garden focuses on Filomena, a 62-year-old widow living alone in a cottage, but taking center stage is her garden, where you can grow lots of beautiful flowers. It’s this garden in which her 9-year-old granddaughter, Frida, gets the idea to snap a photo and enter it for a Gardening Competition of the Year.

It all starts out lovely, but then the scene changes and Filomena steps outside. Her garden is dead. She has no idea what happened, where all her flowers are. With this, and upon receiving a reminder about the competition deadline being in 10 days, she must get to work on replanting and regrowing her garden.

What happened to the once thriving garden?

From here, the gameplay takes focus, but the story is not neglected. Most days, you’ll get letters in the post from your loved ones. It seems that there’s a mystery unfolding. Where’s Frida? What happened? The letters are very cryptic, implying some kind of event occurring, but not giving anything away to keep you guessing and wondering. It doesn’t help that Filomena’s memory is not very good, so you’re as lost as her.

Also, now and again, your garden gets invaded by black butterflies, tormenting Filomena and sending her into a frenzy. Upon dealing with these butterflies, you unlock a memory of Frida playing in your garden, like the good old days. This only drives the mystery further.

Spoilers will be avoided for this review, but there’s a big twist at the end of A Tale in the Garden where everything finally makes sense, and with a surprising conclusion.

Letters from Filomena’s family suggests something that happened previously – but what?

Gameplay – A Therapeutic Rhythm of Planting, Tending, and Growing

The story of A Tale in the Garden isn’t the only key point. The gameplay has an important role too. A Tale in the Garden is a point-and-click game that incorporates gardening mechanics, which is what we’ll look at in further detail here.

Garden to Get Tools

When Filomena discovers that her garden is mysteriously completely dead, she also finds that all her gardening tools and seeds are gone, too. You have to “earn” them back by getting to work on your garden.

You start off with the only tool you still possess: a pair of shears. These are used to cut away the remaining dead flowers. As you do this, blue butterflies appear, floating down into the garden. By interacting with these, they add a new fragment to your gardening book. Once you get all the pieces of a page, you can create a picture of the new gardening tool you’ve just unlocked, allowing you to do more with your garden.

As you progress, working on your garden and finding new picture pieces, you unlock more tools, giving you more options for tending to your garden. You unlock the tools in order, including trowels, seeds, watering hose, bug spray, and more. Having to work to unlock more gardening options gives you an incentive to work harder. The more you plant and grow, the more you have to do, and the faster you can unlock all those tools. However, with a bigger garden to take care of, you have less time to get everything you need done in a day.

You start with just one tool. To unlock them all, you’ll need to grow your garden.

Time Isn’t On Your Side

Since Filomena has entered a gardening competition and you only have 10 days to get your garden ready, you pretty much have to get to work right away to get everything done in time. It almost feels like time management.

The day only lasts so long – and when you’re busy gardening, that time slips away surprisingly quickly. Once it gets too late in the day, the outdoor lights turning on and the crickets starting to chirp, Filomena is unable to continue, forcing you to end the day. This isn’t a bad game mechanic, but you quickly learn not to waste your precious time.

When it gets too late, you cannot garden anymore, even if you’re not finished.

The Relaxing Rhythm of Gardening

Even with the time restricting mechanic, the act of gardening in A Tale in the Garden is very relaxing and therapeutic. It’s very satisfying clearing out the old dead garden and starting anew. Once you unlock all the seeds (and you do actually unlock all 9 of them at once), you’re free to plant whatever you want, wherever you want, in the plots provided.

After planting the seeds, you get the pleasure of watching your flowers grow day-by-day, providing that you keep on top of watering them. Watching your garden blossom is immensely satisfying.

Although you can only tend to one plant at a time, which seems quite tedious and time-consuming, it’s actually quite relaxing and therapeutic. You find yourself getting into a routine of tending to your garden, a rhythm of sorts.

The gardening part might seem repetitive, but it is very relaxing.

A Few Distractions Here and There

It’s not always plain sailing though. Once you unlock the bug spray, you may get a large infestation of bugs on some of your plants. Fortunately, a quick blast of the bug spray sorts this problem out – so long as you get it done before the end of the day!

Also, Filomena’s back might play up now and again. If it seizes up, you have to repeatedly click on her to unstuck her. These are the only major distractions, at least negative ones, and they don’t take too much time away from your progress.

Other distractions are more positive, such as the blue butterflies and piecing together pictures in your book. You also occasionally have to deal with the black butterflies, but this doesn’t happen very often, is scripted in the story, and it isn’t a detriment to your garden.

Once you interact with enough blue butterflies, you can unlock a new tool for the garden.

Graphics – Blocky but Still Luscious

The art style of A Tale in the Garden is interesting. The characters Filomena and Frida, as well as other assets like trees, have a slightly blocky look to them in an artistic way. You think this might be a detriment to the game, but it isn’t. Although relatively simple in its presentation, A Tale in the Garden still succeeds in being attractive to look at. It’s the flowers themselves that really shine in this game, being beautifully portrayed, looking wonderfully organic and real. Watching the flowers grow is such a pleasure.

A mention should also go to the drawings in Filomena’s garden sketchbook, which appear to have been done by Frida. The bright childlike style of the drawings bring warmth and demonstrate a clear bond between grandmother and granddaughter. Piecing together these picture is another highlight of A Tale in the Garden.

The sometimes blocky style doesn’t stop the game from looking beautiful.

Audio – Beautiful and Haunting

A Tale of the Garden is accompanied by gorgeous piano music as you busily tend to the garden and collect sketchbook picture pieces. There’s also a different soothing piece that plays when you send Filomena to bed for the night.

But A Tale in the Garden isn’t just about lovely relaxing piano pieces. Whenever the black butterflies descend, much more dramatic, darker piano music appears, almost in jump scare fashion, to jolt you out of your relaxed lull and remind you that A Tale in the Garden isn’t all light and lovely. The story has a dark, mysterious side to it, too.