Leafy Corner Review – Restock Alocasia And Chill | GameObserver Recommends

We’re far enough into August at this point that most of the Northern hemisphere is ready to say goodbye to the summer weather. With worldwide heatwaves showing no signs of mercy, gardens and flowerbeds that were carefully tended in the spring might be looking withered, wilted, or just plain sunburnt.

But forget all that, I’m retreating into the dark cave that is my office and devoting the next fifteen hours to unlocking all twenty-six achievements in Leafy Corner, where the plants might still die but you never have to leave the AC.

Leafy Corner is the second game from developer Fireline Games, a husband and wife duo from Poland. In a fairly straightforward simulation setup, you take control of a shop on the corner of a bustling street where it seems to always be golden hour, sunlight pooling across the floor. The detail that has been put into the depiction of each plant is incredibly impressive, especially considering we get to see each plant at multiple stages of growth including death. At a first glance, the game’s art style can give the impression of being simplistic, but a lot of care has gone into every individual element, from the cobblestone streets to the NPCs’ accessories.

You start by customizing your player character, and although you can modify your choices at any time going forward, this is one aspect where you are not afforded a greater range of choice as play continues. You do not unlock new outfits, hairstyles, or any other avatar-related accoutrement. Which, considering your character does nothing but stand behind the register, isn’t all that surprising.

Gameplay is, as stated previously, uncomplicated. You choose some furniture and stock your shop with plants, and keep them watered. Camera controls are smooth and the only problem I ever had with placing or moving objects was forgetting to click when moving a plant before switching to watering mode.

Customers eventually wander in, stare around at your carefully decorated shelves, and eventually do one of two things. Unlike a real small business, who would experience a lot of people who come in and leave without buying anything, none of your visitors will do any such thing! Unless you mess it up.

Most customers will wander around and eventually spot a plant that they want to buy. This is actually really cute as they have a little animation with a heart when they’ve found the one they want. Then they’ll pick it up and carry it around, eventually making their way to the register. This can be really funny since one of the standard NPC types are school kids, and some of the plants are bigger than their entire bodies. Watching a two-foot-tall kid haul around a Bird of Paradise while they contemplate my array of Aloe Vera and Lucky Bamboo is actually hilarious.

Let’s go back to the part where you can mess it up. Sometimes a customer will walk in, stare around for a bit, and then freeze with a question mark looming above their head. This means, shocker, that they have a question and need your help. Some will ask for a plant by name, but some will ask you which plants are safe for pet, or which plants like more humidity, i.e. would be good for a bathroom. These are actually pretty easy questions to answer as this type of attribute is listed in the catalog, which you can reference before completing the customer’s request. There’s no time limit, the customers will wait indefinitely to be acknowledged and the “wait” option can be selected an unlimited number of times.

There are also some odd requests where you just have to know what you’ve got on offer, showing drawings and saying “I want one that looks like this”, or giving generic preferences like shape, color, or texture. If you choose the wrong plant to offer to the customer, that’s when they leave without buying anything. I highly offended someone by offering them a plant with heart-shaped leaves when they clearly specified triangle. Or at least they were under the impression they did! The realest simulation of customer service yet. There is an achievement for failing to help a customer! …It’s the achievement with the third highest percentage of players out of all twenty-six achievements, so you’ll be in good company.

When you begin, you have access to three plants and four or five different pots, along with a wide range of furniture and a small amount of (forgive the pun) seed money. Selling plants, buying decorations, and helping customers all have milestones marked on your Task List, along with a multitude of other accomplishments. When you complete items from your task list, you earn Plant Tokens. While you use regular old dollars to buy the plants, pots, and furniture, Plant Tokens are your currency to unlock new plants, pots, and shop decorations.

However, you’re limited to Small plants until you level up your shop’s Reputation. Separate from the Task List, each level of Reputation requires its own specific milestone to be reached: a specific number of plants sold, customers helped, etc. This allows new items in the catalog to be accessed, as well as new abilities including repotting and propagating, and the two available shop expansions into the grassy lot next door.

The reputation-specific tasks were the ones that really got me. Gameplay is calm and relaxing, satisfying in the way it rewards patience with the steady growth of the plants, the ability to arrange and organize your shop with very little restriction on where things can be. With the smooth piano and strings score, it takes me right back to the way I felt playing The Sims: very chill, very fixated on what I’m doing, and very liable to fall for the “just until I hit the next level” trap.

Now that I don’t have those to at least make me check the clock, I’m going to have to set an alarm next time I sit down for a plant-shop session. Because I may have all the achievements, but I don’t have all the variegated plants yet! Don’t even get me started on the variegated plants.

Okay, I’ll get me started. So you can unlock a certain number of plants, like the Green Princess Philodendron. But there are varieties that you can only get by planting specific plants until you, surprise, get those varieties. Some of those are just titled “variegated”, meaning that it’s a variety of the plant that has spotted, streaked, or colored leaves, but there’s also, for example, Pink Princess Philodendron, White Princess Philodendron, and Philodendron Birkin, all variegated varieties from the same “parent” plant.

This is the part that makes the game fun for completionists. Gotta finish the Plant Pokédex! Here’s the tricky bit. Once you’ve “discovered” the variegated version, you don’t get to choose it to plant instead of the original. The only way to get more is to mark at least one of those plants “not for sale” and wait until you have the ability to propagate, making sure you don’t accidentally forget to water or overwater your very precious baby in the meantime.

Overwatering is fairly easy to do if you try to max out the “correct” water level, whereas if you stop just a bit short and remember to top the plants up often, things are easier to manage. Just like in real life! Underwatering is also easy to catch, as the plants both show a little visual tell (yellowing, wilting) and once they get to a dangerously low level, a tiny droplet icon will appear on their pot. I’ve had plants die by rot and withering, and most of that was because I did something like put it in a back row or on a top shelf and forgetting to check on it, or just not looking at that part of the screen for long enough for problems to happen.

I’ve played other plant games where “undoing” plant death can be done with an ad-watch or paying one of the game currencies, but it’s one of the few negative consequences here, with the only real problem being you’ve lost the money you invested in the plant, and potentially a variegated plant you’ll have to wait to get again by chance.

The last mechanic I’d like to point out is the orders. The phone by the checkout counter isn’t just for show, at Reputation Level 2 it rings periodically and someone asks for plants. Similar to customer requests in the store, their request requirements can be checked against the catalog, but unlike the customers, they are very straightforward in what they want, whether specific plants, sizes, or other qualities. These aren’t time-constrained, but you can choose to abandon them so that another order could be taken in its stead. This is useful because occasionally the order may request a specific plant you haven’t unlocked yet, and you may not want to use your Plant Tokens that way.

As your reputation levels up, you can accept more orders simultaneously. This is where the “Not For Sale” marker really comes in handy, since planting custom orders can be a very “set it and forget it” situation, you don’t really want a wandering NPC to grab up your ZZ Plant that someone ordered because they need six low-light friendly medium-sized succulents.

It’s really cool to see how different things look from the first hour to the fifteenth hour of gameplay. I think a lot of “cozy games” recently try to do too much and lose the forest for the trees. But although I may have gone over quite a lot here, the mechanics are introduced slowly, everything is paced out well, and the game is always focused on the thing we came here to do: run a pretend plant shop.

Alyssa reviewed Leafy Corner on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game that was available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.