I played Garden Story a few weeks ago now and I couldn't help feeling its intended experience was so similar to the cozy games of its time. Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and all these titles blew up in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic era, when everyone were confined in their homes, looking for respite in media. What better way to achieve that than through some relaxing, simple cozy simulators? It made sense, at least to me, that Garden Story, a 2021 RPG by Picogram, would draw heavily upon the needs of the average players at the time. However, the sticking point here was that Garden Story was not just a simulator, for it was also, to great extent, an action-RPG. Garden Story, through the box in which it had fit itself, had to now face a challenge: create a fleshed out, exciting, thrilling combat system within a video game also meant to be relaxing. The game attempts, in a contradictory phrase, "cozy combat", to interesting results.
Any single decision made during a game's conception can directly or indirectly affect multitudes in its design. The choice to make the combat more appealing to relaxed, laid-on-the-couch audiences certainly made for a tricky system that must tip-toe on a fine line between combat that isn't on the level of Hades, but also not entirely absent, either (the game is, after all, an action-RPG).
Garden Story achieves its "cozy combat" in many ways. One method is lowering enemy density and also making the most common enemy (slimes called Rot) completely passive during most of the day. That is to say, the Rot will not attack the player during most times of each game day. This is perhaps akin to how Minecraft handles its combat, with nights generally becoming more hostile as the sun sets (although, unlike Garden Story, Minecraft doesn't have zombies walking around who will simply ignore you). This essentially accomplishes a natural game loop that involves a slow start -- the morning, with room for breathing -- which then slowly transforms into a fight or run scenario -- the night, when all the monsters congregate. A day-and-night cycle lends to this well-established game loop, making the transition between Garden Story's desired states, relaxed and hostile, more seamless*.
[*] seamless-ish. Technically, the transitions between each part of the day is actually very abrupt. But it works enough as a "hostility gradient" (or a "combat gradient") for all intents and purposes.
Another way Garden Story reinforces a relaxed tone in combat scenarios is by disallowing high rates of action via a stamina system. Basically, attacking, dodging, and running all consume stamina at different rates, and a player must wait to restore stamina once it is depleted. Regardless of whether or not you like Garden Story's stamina meter (I personally am indifferent), its purpose is to make action feel slower, more controlled, while also less thrilling and high-paced. Somewhat related is the fact that weapons in the game, while serving slightly different niches, all act more or less the same, reducing complexity further. Once again, the homogenization of weaponry and the limitation of combat through stamina are parts of the combat system that serve to make the whole less complicated and more approachable, even if at the expense of a relatively low skill ceiling.
Unfortunately, while this system actually stands up decently through most of the game, Garden Story stumbles a few times near its last bend. Around the story's climax, our grape character, Concord, is tasked to fight a bunch of bosses in dungeons, as well as navigate a snowy forest maze, to finally fight the root cause of rot and decay in the grove. The supposedly relaxed tone of Garden Story's combat here is all but thrown out, making these high-octane portions of the game feel so out of place not only thematically, but also mechanically. By the climax, most players will have spent a good majority of their playtime gathering materials, fishing, cutting trees, and building up dilapidated town sections, so to throw them into the tentacles of a giant Octopi monster and the heart of sewer rot just feels odd. Personally, whenever I entered a dungeon or fought a boss, it felt as though I were playing a different game altogether.
At its core, the reason for this discrepancy between the game's climax and the rest of its gameplay lies in what an action-RPG really desires: action. It's in the name! The sudden jump to action is not really so sudden, as the narrative and the genre of the game demands it in the first place. At the end of the day, even if you try to design your combat mechanics in such ways that swords now whisper instead of scream, where sickles now pull instead of prey, where shovels now tap instead of dig; an action game will seek action, almost hungrily. It's not that other cozy games necessarily fare better: arguments can certainly be made against Stardew Valley's combat also. But the truth is, in Stardew Valley, combat is almost explicitly expressed as a "different" or "separate" part of the game. On the other hand, combat pervades Garden Story.
Combat in Garden Story likely has nowhere to go. Combat was designed here from the roots of the game and had followed its journey 'til harvest, in the form of budding flowers. Unfortunately, at the final moment, those flowers grew black and red pigmentation, contrasting the curvaceous, smooth stems. Lovely, eye-catching, but probably not the serene beauties the plant had come to expect.
If you want my suggestions, maybe it should have committed harder to its
"cozy combat" style all the way to the end. If the narrative was slightly transfigured, it might have been more fitting, to be honest! Imagine, an action-RPG where the central conflict is resolved not through action, or at least not through nail-biting combat, but actually through some more "peaceful" or elegant methods. Where, at the last moment, instead of Concord pulling up their sword to defeat the final baddie, perhaps they should've drawn it back instead and, as the grove's Guardian, allowed peace to flourish in other ways. Systems other than combat do exist (though most are under-utilized). Besides, as it stands now, Garden Story's finale message boils down to: "Outdated systems should be left behind, especially those who turn people against each other", or something along those lines. It's beautiful, though violence still remains key in its answer. Video games will be violent, am I right fellas? It just had to be the sword. Indeed, it just had to be the combat.
All that being said, I remained attached to Garden Story a lot; enough for me to want to finish it until the end. Still, due to the contradiction belying one of its core components -- its combat -- that wishes to be one thing and another entirely, which often clashed and contradicted, the game personally did not feel entirely cohesive in how it played, and partly in the messages it tried to send.
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