Here's one more for your digital toybox: Garden Galaxy, a fun little game about building cozy, relaxing landscapes by collecting various kinds of environmental tiles, chairs, tents, cauldrons, bushes, and other such garden features.
It's a clever blend of cozy design toy and idler, encouraging you to discover new things by placing tiles to make a garden that's unique to you. As you build you earn coins, letting you buy new plants, furniture, and decorations across a variety of themed sets. You then use them to build a garden that can be further customized with lighting, effects, and backgrounds.
And of course you can have mysterious little visitors come to the garden and leave you coins, which draws in the idle element here. "⏳ Visitors will arrive even when idle so you can leave the game on in the background," says the game description.
Garden Galaxy does make use of some mobile game tropes—without indulging in microtransactions or time-wasting. It has the flavor of random item collection of a gacha game, for example, but lets you stack the odds towards getting something you want or blocking something you don't want.
Garden Galaxy is somewhere between idle game and digital toy, or perhaps a combination of the two, and I quite like that. It's one for you if you were enchanted by Townscaper or Cloud Gardens in the past few years.
You can find Garden Galaxy on Steam, where it's $10 with a free demo, and the indie dev behind it is Anneka Tran, who you can find on Twitter.
In other digital toy news, both Chris Livingston and I find the look of this castle-building sandbox absolutely mesmerizing.
