A Hero and a Garden is a poignant and touching clicker game
Since it can be difficult to find time to finish video games, let alone find interesting ones that will provide a complete entertaining experience in a few hours. For this series I’ll talk about a short game that could easily be played to completion over a weekend.
One of my favorite game creators I found while writing these reviews of short games is npckc. Finding them first through their visual novel One Night, Hot Spring and then later writing about it’s sequel Last Day of Spring. So when I saw that one of their games was going to be available on consoles, not just on PC, it seemed like a great excuse to play it. It also was one of their games I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet, but it turned out to be both a nice respite from the world for a few hours and a very touching story.
A Hero and a Garden is one part clicker one part visual novel. The story goes that a kingdom’s Princess was kidnapped by an evil witch, but all those that sought to rescue her were rebuffed by the witch’s magic. The Princess’s knight then attacked the evil witch’s tower, after destroying much of the monster village at the tower's feet. However rather than getting the knight to flee, the witch cursed him to spend his days tending to her magical berry garden. And so as the hero you are forced to grow berries that the monsters need to recover from your attack, while using what little money you make to help fund the town's repairs as well.
The actual gameplay is pretty simple, your garden starts with a single berry bush which grows new berries every few seconds until there are at most three on the bush. You can then click each individual berry to collect it, click on a basket that appears near the bush when it’s full which collects all the bush’s berries at once, or you can wait for your helper bat monster Sooty to collect them. Eventually you’ll have five bushes each one producing different types of berries at different rates.
You then fill requests by the town’s monster with the berries you collect, each time getting a visual novel sequence of the hero interacting with the monster who made the request. Helping you learn more about the hero and the monsters, as well as eventually explaining how things got to this point. Thanks to the game’s fantastic characters and writing these sequences become things you really strive to get, not only to give yourself a break from berry collecting.
I wouldn’t necessarily describe the berry collecting part as fun or requiring much thought, although I think the game would be much lesser without it. The gardening for the hero is meant as a punishment, while it doesn’t get that way when playing it does become a bit rote. But as you fulfill more requests and get new story sequences it feels as though it becomes less a chore, but a task you are choosing to do to help the monsters. Especially as you learn more about these people and this place, and you also see the hero softening to it as well. Through this seemingly simple menial task the game manages to put you in the same head space as the hero, which in turn makes it easier to connect with him and help make the story moments more meaningful.
A Hero and A Garden manages to weave a very poignant narrative about perspective, understanding others, and acceptance from a seemingly simplistic fairy tale premise and incredibly simplistic gameplay. It feels sort of appropriate that this game is coming to consoles around the same time Moon is finally getting a Western release as A Hero and A Garden feels very anti-RPG, not as in against the RPG but as sort of the opposite what a fantasy RPG traditionally is. A reminder that behind titles like hero, witch, princess and monster are just people trying to live their lives.
A Hero and A Garden was developed by npckc, and is available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and Xbox One for $4.99, and for pay what you want on Itch.io (Windows/mac OS/Linux). It takes about 2 to 3 hours to finish.
