With farm and life sims being all the rage on the cozy gaming side of the indie scene, we’ve seen all sorts of variations in the style of play for them. With Garden of the Sea it appears that it was also developed as a VR game, so in this case the first-person perspective does change things up a bit from the subgenre norm. While you could view it as either a good or bad thing, the VR roots can be felt in the nature of your movement and activity, so it does simply have a style all its own.

Somewhat just unceremoniously dropped on an island, you’ll have only a few signs to work out how to get started. Working through simple movement you’ll then need to puzzle out what you’ll need to do to set the game in motion. While the signs and bubbles over some characters’ heads do an admirable job of trying to be helpful, there is still a bit of a learning curve for how things properly work in this world you find yourself in. Especially when you get to bigger areas, where there are far more things to craft to the point that it’s hard not to feel a bit distracted, there can also be some frustrations. At the size they’re shown on signs there’s some room for confusing different plants and that can be aggravating at first until you resolve any confusion you may have.

Once the experience opens up a bit, with far more things that could be planted, cultivated, created, and traded for, I’ll admit that it was a bit overwhelming. You move from being pretty narrowly focused on what you need to collect or put together to having loads of things to make or grow, but since some require you to make other things first there turns out to be a chain of things you need to make to accomplish some tasks. You can work this out, but as you begin to stack up build tasks you’ll hit probably the game’s biggest wall, and that’s your very limited inventory space. This resulted in my island getting a bit messy with various materials I figured out I didn’t need for the moment, but that I’ll need at some point, and lacking the means to organize them all a little more effectively the inventory problem was pretty irksome at times.

In the end, I do appreciate the different perspective and take on this genre, but at the same time it feels like it’s probably better suited to VR play, and its associated lower expectations, than with a controller on a system like the Switch. The fact is, here we have Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and a host of other excellent farm or life sims to enjoy, making this experience more of a tough sell by comparison. Still, if you love simming it up, and are simply seeking a novel way to interact with the subgenre, it could still work out well for you.