Article Updated: New entries added on December 12th, 2020
I like gardening, but I now live in London, in a world of concrete and stone. I used to garden a lot while back home in upstate New York. My grandmother had the largest garden I’ve ever seen — loads of space allocated to grow tomatoes, green beans, and potatoes for our family. My grandma loved plants and gardening, and as a child I got to spend a lot of time in her garden, playing among plants.
It is getting to be autumn as I write this, which very much makes me miss the flowers that it is now be too cold for them to have survived outside. So, instead, I turn to video games to fill my heart. I have compiled a list of loads of gardening games, all for you to take a look at to fill these cooler months.
Ooblets by Glumberland
Ooblets is an adorable adventure game about growing cute creators, but not for eating, instead of dance battling! That’s pretty interesting, I know. In Ooblets you start off in a small town, learning about the creators that grow and live there. You have your own little barn and farm plots, which allow you to grow resources and ooblet creators of your own.
Many of the towns people have quests for you, there are tons of items to collect, and the dance battles between new ooblets and your own creatures are adorable! You will be playing cards which will allow your creature to dance the stage away, looking to defeat the other creature and gain a seed so you can grow a version of them as well.
Big Farm Story by Goodgame Studios
Big Farm Story is a lovely farming game that has more than meets the eye! You have gone back to your grandparent’s farm, after receiving a strange letter from him, only to discover that the farm has been ruined in a large storm, your grandfather is missing, and everyone in the town seems to need some help. Through farming and fixing up the farm, you will discover more items and a story well worth sinking your teeth into.
Exploring the area around will show you all of the people you need to meet up with and talk too, which does a great job of distracting you while you leave your farm to grow. The town is quite charming and welcoming, very happy to see a helpful person, and you can be that person making yourself a real part of this world. It’s a warm game that is well worth checking out, and you won’t have to wait too long for crops to grow!
Mr. Tulip Head by Stilaan
Mr. Tulip Head is a cute looking, garden puzzle game where you are looking to lay tulips, pathstones, statues and water in the best possible way to gain the most charm. Each level is a different plot of land — some with items already laid out on them. You also get an inventory full of new pieces that you are able to use to decorate the plot. The water, flowers, and other items already on the plot of land can sometimes be moved, but other times they might be stuck in place.
You’ll need to think carefully about how you want to layout the land, to meet each and every requirement listed by Mr. Tulip Head. He provides a checklist that you need to meet for each plot of land. You are able to move around pieces that you have already played, so trying out a design isn’t set in stone. Mr. Tulip Head is also just a charming character, the plots of land are fun to layout, and watching your flowers bloom and add charm is very fun.
Reap by Daniel Linssen
Reap on the other hand is a survival game where you also get to grow a little garden, if you’d like to stay alive.
You have washed up upon a distant shore with nothing left. This world seems to be quite empty, but you can find an axe and a shovel around. You can then use these tools to make the world your own. Axes can be used to knock down trees for wood and shovels can be used for gardening!
Gardening seems to only be done with turnips — but, as you need to eat to survive, these turnips are pretty important. You can find loose turnips and can either eat them raw or plant them in hopes that they grow more. Reap has a day and night cycle — and when it’s dark, you have a very limited scope to see in, so spending your daylight hours carefully will be key to being alive. That, and planting tons and tons of turnips.
Blomst by Prinsessa
Blomst sees you landing on various barren planets, hoping to fix the atmosphere. Each of these planets have only a few flowers on them, but it is up to you to harvest them to have more to plant. There are different types of flowers which can only grow on their specific biomes. You’ll need to place them in the right area and come back to harvest more once they start to sparkle.
You can also sell your seeds and purchase different ones through the shop. Slowly, the atmosphere of your planet will increase, and you will end up with a planet blooming back to life. There are loads of other planets in the atmosphere that need your help, so moving onto the next planet and starting again will allow you to grow your gardens across the galaxy.
Cropshots by Rocío, Agustín, Sergio, David, & Incompetech
Cropshots turns your plants into moody teenagers while they are growing — constantly throwing their seeds at you. As a farmer, your only means of money is planting and selling various crops. You must quickly plant them, then avoid the seeds being thrown at you. The various different vegetables have different bullet patterns, and you do have a dive option, but you’ll need to stick close.
Once the plants have fully grown, you will have just a few seconds to collect them while they are fresh, otherwise they will then die off, and all of your dodging will be for nothing. After you harvest your plants you can take it to the back of a truck, selling it off to a farmers market. The money you gain counts as your score and can be used to buy more challenging and expensive seeds! Cropshots is a very intense farming game.
Botanist by Jamo Games
Botanist brings gardening into the modern day. Instead of having a large farm to take care of, you are growing potted plants in your home and selling them through the internet! You have recently been fired from your job, but you’ve always loved plants. Now’s your chance to start your own botany business.
You are able to purchase seeds online, each of which are procedurally generated from the word you choose to call them up. You can then look at forms and see if any of the planted flowers on your shelf match the requests available. If some do, you can take a picture and mail your flower to them, gaining some reputation and money. Slowly, you are able to grow your business all from the livingroom of your own home.
Voodoo Garden by m.hanka
Voodoo Garden has you trying to grow potion ingredients in a secluded part of the swamp. You’ll then need to use these ingredients to create potions, which you can then sell for coins. As you progress through the game you will end up purchasing more plants and seeing more creatures come as they come to visit you. You need to click on ripe plants to pick them, as well as animals to get a drop from them.
You can purchase ghosts and various helpers that will harvest along with you, all while creating the most spooky garden you’d like. Voodoo Garden can be played as an idle game, so once you have a blooming garden you can let it go on your second monitor, watching ghosts harvest and bees buzz around.
Fantasy Farming – Orange Season by Hudell
Following your dreams, you have decided to purchase a piece of land in the town of Orange to become a farmer. Alone, with only your little dog, you have moved to this bit of land in hopes that it would be everything you dreamed of. After arriving at your farm and being greeted by the lovely members of your new town, you are able to start your dream.
Planting seeds, watering crops, and completing quests from townsfolk are all important parts of the game, however, you will start to find that not everyone is happy with you moving in. The previous owner of the farm is looking to gain his land back; as he lost it to the bank. He doesn’t seem to care what you do, so long as he continues to earn enough money to buy you out.
Fantasy Farming – Orange Season also has a variety of cute animals that you can slowly befriend if you don’t like the humans too much. This game is currently still in development, but there is a lot to do at the moment!
Topsoil by Nico Prins
Topsoil is a lovely, sleek-looking garden puzzle game that you can play on your mobile device. You are given a plot of land and a bunch of flowers, or seeds, to plant on it. Flowers are planted fully grown, while seeds will need to wait a few turns before blooming. At the top of the screen you can see what plant is coming up next and when your next turn to harvest is.
Harvesting groupings of the same flower on the same plot of land will in turn change that plot of land to a new color. Plots of land that are the same color hook together, giving you a wider area to plant the same flowers on. The more flowers you harvest, the better your score will become.
Topsoil basically works like this, you just need to make sure you always have a spot for the next flower to be planted. If the entire garden is full and it’s not time to harvest, you will end up losing and need to restart at a new garden plot. There are a variety of different achievements within the game as well, so you can aim for the best garden possible.
You can find Topsoil on the GooglePlay store.
That Blooming Feeling by Tots’ Team
That Blooming Feeling is an abstract garden game where you become a water creature, dipping yourself into a pond before running around a large desert. As you walk around, you will see plants grow from the water droplets you are letting fall of your strange body. Some plants and areas need more water than you can bring, so you can explode by them!
Exploding will spawn you in your little pond, allowing you to grab some more water and do it all over again. Slowly, the world around you fills with flowers, and with them comes creature curious about the fruit and plants being grown. You can watch them take some of your crop, enjoying their strange shapes and seeing what they are doing. If you’re looking for a very different type of garden game, That Blooming Feeling is for you.
Medel by Owen Bell
Medel is a relaxing flower growing game, with no real goals other than to enjoy yourself. You are placed on an island with some flowers growing there already. You can then harvest samples from the native flowers and breed them with other samples to make new hybrids. The flowers’ genes will merge and mutate, making something completely new.
These flowers and plants then grow as time passes, populating your island and creating wondrous alien planets, all for you to walk around and enjoy. These plants look to be procedurally generated — and there is a huge variety that can be planted and discovered. The music in Medel is also relaxing, completing this experience.
Staxel by PlayStaxel
Staxel is a charming, voxel-based farming game where you get to live in a small village, meeting some different folk and growing on your own plot of land. There is a lot to do in this town; from fulfilling quests from villagers, collecting various objects, purchasing new items, or helping improve the village as a whole — you’ll never not have something to do.
Like most farming games with a village, your farm does need a lot of work before you can start growing. You’ll need to keep up with your farming chores to keep this farm working. There are also animals to take care of as well.
You can even play with your real life friends via online mulitplayer!
Graveyard Keeper by Lazy Bear Games
Graveyard Keeper does not start off with you creating a garden, but — stick with me — we will get there. At first, you are the new graveyard keeper: someone who needs to look after the corpses and make a good church for the town. You also get to harvest flesh from these corpses for a little money on the side — selling them to the town. As well as fighting slimes, fishing, and growing a garden.
There is a variety of recipes that you learn over time in Graveyard Keeper, some of which need fresh veggies to be grown. You have a plot of land you can purchase, allowing you to plant and grow seeds. You can also go and rob other farms, pulling up their produce to get seeds of your own, as well as some stuff to cook with. You have limited energy each day, so you will need to divide it between burying bodies, making your graves look good, and taking care of your extremely important garden.
Sky Farm by Squidcor
Sky Farm is a simple-looking farming game, where you must connect water streams to crop areas, creating red plants. These red plants can then be harvested and sold at a market. Movement around this farm, that you are building, is where things are super unique. You can place famers who then follow paths. You’ll need to create paths up the side of mountains, allowing them to wander up there if needed.
These farmers will then work at their own pace, picking up flowers and bringing them to the market. You’ll need to keep in mind where your paths go as they may not follow the way you wanted them to. Water in Sky Farm is also tricky, as water is pre-placed, only allowing you to create streams from the main source. You will need to plant right by the water, and have a path right by the plant, in order to have an efficient harvest. Planning is everything!
Verdant Skies by Howling Moon Software
Verdant Skies sees you planting a garden out on a new planet in space! There are a few other people who are colonizing the planet, but you have crash landed there! With nowhere to go you’re stuck helping out where needed. The first task you have been given is to grow a garden in the nearby land. Along with fishing, gathering, chopping trees, and hitting rocks to gain rock shards.
You will also need to build up relationships with the people you are stranded with, along with a house for yourself. Each day you have a limited amount of energy before needing to sleep. At the same time, you will receive quests via email from the captain of this mission, so you will need to do what you are told to keep the peace!
Space Garden by like, a Hundred Bears
Space Garden is a relaxing, slow-paced gardening game where you land on an alien planet. This planet doesn’t have a lot of life on it, yourself aside. There is also an abundance of rocks which you can mine and deliver to a strange temple. You can then trade these rocks in for different pots!
Placing your pots will allow flowers to slowly grow from them. Over time, you can make your drill stronger to get various other colored rocks and trade those for more pots. Slowly, you can end up with a planet full of pots of plants — growing as high as the sky. Space Garden works well as a slow, relaxing game to lightly check in on, mining a little bit at a time in.
A Good Gardener by Turnfollow
A Good Gardener sees you growing flowers in a very broken garden, all to contribute to the war efforts. You are mute but cooperative. You are a deserter, one who has been assigned to growing these new crops. Each day, you are given seeds that you can then plant in the various bits of dirt in this strange, broken, walled-off area. You can water these seeds and watch them grow.
As time passes, the world that you need to turn to every day becomes more luscious. Although things are destroyed, and you don’t seem to have belongings, you have a lot of time to sit and think. A lot of time to enjoy the flowers you are growing. You’re not exactly alone — an overseer chats to you from time to time, watching over your work.
Earth Tongue by Critterdust
Earth Tongue sees you taking care of the world you find yourself in, documenting everything you create as you go. This is more of an idle game, one where you gain points which you can then spend on changing the weather, adding types of fungus, and adding creatures to the game. These bugs buzz around for you to watch and study.
Fungus and plants grow and spread, slowly taking over the world (or dying if they are neglected). All while you learn about them and document everything you find in your journal. You can terraform the land, moving areas up or down to help life spread over your jurisdiction. There are a bunch of different worlds to pick from first — even a special, spooky halloween world as well as both easy and challenging ones. It’s really cool to come back and see everything that has grown in your land!
Succulents by Andrew Gleeson, Maike Vierkant, Jukio Kallio, & Niilo Takalainen
Succulents is a cute little game where you tendi to a garden deep within some sort of sewers. You have a bundle of different seeds, a broken bucket, and a little shovel to play around with. Next to you there is a small amount of water that you can use to water the ground beneath the surface.
These plants grow up and up, becoming beautiful and quite different things. Succulents is a short game, but it’s quite interesting to see this severed hand grow such a variety of things. You can dig up plants you don’t like them or put ones you really enjoy within the beam of light coming from the roof. It’s all up to you, where want to place your garden.
Home Grown by Nicholas Staracek, Zoe Lovatt, Rebecca Owen, Kelvin Tse, & Pritish Choudhary
Home Grown is a very bright and colorful gardening game where you get to care for your little garden. You start off with a few seeds, some fertilizer, and a watering can. You can then plant your different colored flowers wherever you wish within the large room you occupy. You can then water them, allowing them to grow.
If your flowers start to get a bit brown you can feed them fertilizer, which will bring them back to life. These flowers move towards the sky, seeming to leak petals, as you care for them. You end up building your own colorful world, your own space in your home, with a garden you take care of.
Home Grown is beautiful, in a very interesting way.
Succulent Drive USA by uvwar
Succulent Drive USA has you controlling a potted plant, a small one, able to move quickly around a strange world. Rain clouds move quickly across the land, giving small patches of the land tons of water. If you get your pot to stay under this water then the plant will grow. Once you think the plant is big enough, you can wander around to a spot — a hole within the ground, and move your pot into it.
The flower will click into place and you will be given a new one, with a new color, to then repeat the process. Moving around these plants feels like driving a car — adding an entire new level to trying to get your plants to grow. Luckily, it’s as easy as keeping it under water until you are happy with the plant’s size.
Grow by Felix, Calinedmusic, & Firepunchd
Grow is a very simple gardening game where you appear on an island that has some plants on it. Slowly, these plants grow, until they are completely mature. You can walk up to these plants and grab their seeds, then place a few in your hand and move it around to plant them — watching them fly into the ground.
These new plants then grow! Slowly getting bigger and bigger. You are also able to use a blue stick in your other hand to slightly zoom in on the world around you. I’m not sure if there is another purpose for this, but it’s good to get a closer look as things grow. In Grow, the various trees and plants do get bigger quite fast, allowing you to really fill up the land.
Botanic Balcony by Atemly Games
Botanic Balcony takes you into a small garden of your own.
Using a VR headset in a small room, you are able to plant your own virtual garden and tend to it, much like a real life balcony in your house. Unlike the real balcony, you might actually have some space for this one without having to move your house!
You can plant potted flowers, watering them and making them grow, all within the world of your own room. If you have a VR device and are craving a garden then this might fill what you need!
There are, of course, many, many other gardening games — but I couldn’t write this article without mentioning Stardew Valley and Slime Rancher, which we reviewed previously on the site. These two wonderful, well developed games are worth taking a look into, if you haven’t already.
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