The Garden Path offers a purposefully slow escape
The Garden Path begins with a message asking you to be careful when foraging plants in the real world and, as someone who spent their teenage years living in the middle of nowhere, trust me when I say this is good advice. (Sometimes you have to make your own fun, but eating too much marsh samphire can churn your stomach.) It’s also fitting advice from a game where foraging plays a major role in cultivating your garden. You’ll venture out into the storybook-styled wildness, snipping plant cuttings or collecting flower buds, before finding the right place to plant your seedlings and watch them grow.
Though, even with this knowledge in mind, the first hours of The Garden Path do feel a little directionless. Sure a tutorial will pop up occasionally and there’s a hint about a mysterious note, but neither provide much overall guidance; the tutorial only appears when you encounter a relevant mechanic and the note being, well, a mystery. Due to this, I felt more like I was lost in the woods rather than exploring them when I first arrived in the garden, so I decided to craft my own path. In my inventory lay a pair of broken secateurs and on my map sat three question marks, making my quest one of investigating these three locations to see if any held the answer to fixing my tool.
It didn’t take long to reach my first location where I met Augustus – a bear who happens to be a park ranger, which is odd considering I always thought bears like to eat those. Maybe Augustus is a vegetarian. Thankfully, it was a good thing I ran into Augustus because he had the other half of my secateurs and, for the price of some bracken sprigs, he helpfully fixed them! From there I ventured further into the garden where I met Larto, a buffalo who taught me how to fish, and Thom (strong Tom Bombadil vibes here) who sells seeds.
