One well-defined corner of the ongoing cozy gaming revolution is absolutely the meticulous organization sim. Best epitomized by titles like Unpacking and A Little to the Left, these are games that let everyone’s most anal retentive tendencies thrive through the satisfaction of ensuring everything is properly in place. While it isn’t an experience everyone will enjoy, there’s absolutely something very satisfying about getting everything arranged just right, even while ironically sitting in a physical room full of chaos. There’s no doubt that Urban Jungle was looking to blend that spirit with a green thumb, as well as some family legacy feels, but the results are mixed.

From the perspective of a botany and gardening sim, the game does a reasonably good job. Your character has picked up her love of plants from her connection to her grandmother, and armed with that passion and some knowledge your goal will be to ensure the plants you buy are getting what they need. In general, you’ll be looking to see whether they thrive in the light or dark, prefer moisture or more dry conditions, and then which other varieties they prefer to be around. The better you’re able to satisfy those needs, the better you’ll score, which will then give you access to additional plants and so on. For the most part that aspect of play works reasonably well, plotting out how best to position your plants in different groupings that are at the edges of varied zones, in order to help maximize points for proximity to plants they get along with while being away from those they don’t.

Showing some ambition, there’s also then an organizational component to the game that’s more akin to the aforementioned Unpacking, and unfortunately it’s the somewhat half-baked implementation of those elements that place the experience on much less steady ground. These tasks are tied to side objectives that will award you currency which you can use to buy more exotic plants, but while in theory they add another layer of careful and meticulous planning of your spaces to the mix, they more often work in the opposite direction. The problem is that in order to get exposure to sunlight or moisture, or to avoid them, there are only so many places you can put things, and if you’re trying to maximize your points you’ll be even more constrained. More often than not that will require you to move anything that isn’t a plant out of those spaces, and arrange them in a way that works for gameplay but are either functionally or aesthetically impractical. Failing to do a better job of providing more proper means of managing the competing priorities these styles of play demand, the final product works well enough but feels uneven.