Garden Story Review (YellowAfterlife)
A pleasant adventure RPG. You get quite a number of weapons and cards to fit different playstyles, some questing, some dungeon-delving (with a couple puzzles here and there), a bunch of hats for your grape, and even a bit of construction. The music is a delight. Pixel art is a wonder, with one amazing character after another.
The overall formula is very nice:
A day starts.
You have your story quest goal(s), and the game hands you 2-3 daily "requests" for the current town that you can do if you'd like to upgrade gear that comes from this town.
You also have descriptions for card unlocks (split into sections that you unlock along with story progression). These are mostly "do a thing in a way ". Cards affect character stats in various ways or offer additional effects for tools/weapons.
A thing that's quite distinct is that there's no rush - a day doesn't "end" until you're back home and gone to bed. Yes, a bunch more enemies spawn at night, but if you've spent all day doing the story quest and then decided that you'd still like to do the requests, you can.
Things to be aware of:
The game starts pretty slow, "hit an enemy a couple times before stamina runs out" kind of slow. But don't worry, it doesn't stay that way for long.
The game runs at 30fps, which can take a little bit to get used to. That said, everything seems to be fairly pixel-perfect, so I'm not sure what higher framerate would offer, except for maybe a slightly smoother camera.
I wouldn't call it a hard game, and you won't die easily so long as you don't get reckless. But if you do enjoy risks, there are enough cards to do a "glass cannon" setup in mid/late-game.
All in all I highly recommend.