Tiny Eden Review – Great Gardening With Bad Bugs (Not The Insects)

Tiny Eden is a cozy gardening game where you move into your friend’s apartment while she is gone on an excursion. Your mission is to grow a variety of plants on the apartment’s balconies and restart your lab to help bring back pollinating bees.

When you first start the game, you are in an unknown enclosed area and get an email notification. It’s from your best friend, whose apartment you are moving into after your lab was shut down. You make your way into the apartment and are directed to go out onto the balcony by both a diamond on the screen and a task checklist in the upper left-hand corner. Your first task is to clean up the balcony and start planting your beginner plants in their respective spots.

You then meet EN-G1, your helpful little flying drone, which is also occupying the apartment you have been given. You can assign small tasks to the drone, and as you accumulate different types of drones, they can help you along your gardening journey with a variety of tasks. EN-G1 helps you start Tiny Eden; after conversing with the bot, you receive another set of tasks: watering the strawberry plants on the balcony.

There is a helpful Gardener’s Guide and Encyclopedia that you can check out as you garden. These are both tools that should be extremely helpful as you learn the intricacies of Tiny Eden, as I found all the alerts and tasks you are set to do a bit overwhelming when first thrown at you. The Encyclopedia provides brief introductions to various tasks for your gardening endeavors. It is meant to be used as a show-and-do method, with two steps for almost every action, accompanied by pictures. The Gardening Guide explains what the different warnings and labels on your plants mean, which is crucial for knowing what to fix. If something is wrong, the Encyclopedia should have the label covered inside.

While the idea is great in theory, there are a plethora of issues in practice, such as photos not appearing in the Gardener’s Guide and duplicate pages in the Encyclopedia. It feels that neither of these sections has been finished yet, which is a bit worrying since they are both so vital to Tiny Eden. This was the first sign I saw of bugs in the game, but there seem to be many that have not been fixed yet, which is worrying for the upcoming release date.

After you get a start on growing the variety of plants that you have at your disposal thanks to the shop, you are also tasked with cooking these grown plants into different dishes. There are many groups of people who could order your food, but at the start, you are focused only on the DIY club.

You have to cook and deliver a good number of orders to gain reputation with the DIY club. As your reputation increases, you unlock additional goods you can purchase in the store. Every level unlocks more and more, adding significant progression to Tiny Eden, which I feel is good for its longevity and playability.

At the same time, you are trying to set up a home lab on the side. You have to either buy or find a hefty amount of three different construction items and prepare a few recipes using them. The lab seems to be a sign that you are reaching the mid-game, where things start to settle down and get into a groove with all of the different responsibilities you have while staying in your friend’s apartment.

You also start to work alongside The Green Group, where the guy you meet is literally labeled “a shady guy.” I wish there was more explanation as to why, but instead of really explaining the story, it feels more like the game is just focused on giving you certain tasks to complete. I wish there was more to its storyline. The emails you receive provide a bit of story, but there seems to be some gaping holes that I wish were filled.

The music in Tiny Eden is fantastic, and something that I continually really enjoyed. As tracks change, in the top-middle of your screen, there will be a little pop-up with a record that shows you what track is playing and who it is by. I thought this was a very nice touch, and I liked every track that I listened to; the music definitely fits the vibe of everything the game has to offer.

Unfortunately, this is where I started to see some more bugs in Tiny Eden. Along with basic bugs, such as clipping through certain objects and other easily explained issues, I started encountering larger issues as well. One of these was with the save files. It appears that you can save different loads, as there are “Continue”, “New game”, and “Load” tabs right when you launch Tiny Eden. This implied to me that you could have multiple runs of the game, because why would you need both a Continue tab and a Load tab if they have the same function and only one saved run is allowed?

I started a new run when I began this review to refresh my memory, but unfortunately it overwrote all my progress. I was about five years into the story, so I was rather upset that I couldn’t go back to all of my hard work and continue the story where I had left off. I tried to get my save back in several ways, but nothing worked.

I took a deep breath and was determined to start over and get back to where I was, but on this new save, I clipped into the window and was not able to escape for over 30 minutes, and it seemed that I finally jiggled hard enough to break myself free. I tried restarting and relaunching Tiny Eden multiple times and had no luck, as I kept coming back to the same place over and over again, clipped into the window between the balcony and the bed.

I really wanted to love Tiny Eden. I adore cozy aesthetics, and this game honestly felt like it had so much potential. I think if these bugs are fixed in the released version of the game, then I would love to return to it. There are a lot of mechanics to learn, but once you get the hang of everything, I was genuinely having a fun time. Unfortunately, the number of bugs kept piling up, leaving Tiny Eden ultimately feeling unfinished.

Angel reviewed Tiny Eden on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.