In Garden Galaxy, you arrange randomly delivered pots, plants, furniture and ornaments into your own happy little scene. I spent a contented evening with it a few weeks ago, fussing over the shape of my water feature and the angle of my gnome.
If you like tinkering and tidying, I think you’d like it too, and this week it has received a major new update with lots more items to play with.
The Bounty update adds two new sets, over 50 new items, and “area selection”, according to the announcement on Steam. That last one is important. In Garden Galaxy, you receive items by dropping coins into a flame, and while the type of coin affects the type of item, which precise item you receive is random. If you don’t like the item, you can trade it back, but often I found I did like the item but I didn’t yet have a place to put it.
Cue lots of sorting, stacking and organising, which is part of the pleasure of the thing, but being able to drag-select an area of items all at once feels like it will make the whole process pleasingly more efficient.
Aside from the 50 new items spread across all existing item sets, there are two entirely new sets: the Rainbow set, which contains “a variety of special items” and which can be retrieved using new Rainbow coins; and the Market set, which contains “outdoor market and food items.” You can find a list of “notable” new items and features in the Steam news post, but they’re rightly behind spoiler text because part of the delight of Garden Galaxy lies in discovering cute new objects.
I should add, given the talk of “coins”, that there are no microtransactions here. It’s a fictional economy of garden sprite-delivered coins, and they’re balanced for playful surprise rather than some sort of gachapon nightmare. Garden Galaxy is also currently 20{d0f68332078ae50ae5cd49ede95b9d76bcf00fa473a5a7068cdab9d644705628} off, and therefroe £6.39/$8 from Steam.
