The Garden Path's savviest design decision: connecting to the cosmos

I'm only a few hours into Carrotcake's cozy forest exploration/gardening sim, The Garden Path, but I'm already impressed. I have whatever gene it is that makes games of this nature connect on a deep synaptic level: on my Switch alone I've played well over 2500 hours of the original Cozy Grove (itself a sort of "Animal Crossing with crafting and more story"), and close to that in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. There's something deeply appealing about this style of game for me as a sort of warm-up to my day (and nice place to check in on and chill out with during the work day), and thus far, The Garden Path is scratching that itch well.

It's much more Cozy Grove than anything else in cozy sim territory, but with a fairly different tone and much more emphasis on gardening vs. other kinds of crafting. We have the requisite chill questing on behalf of cute characters, lots of checking up on plant life, foraging, fishing (though there is a different minigame afoot for actually catching them) and here, the gardening. But there's one particularly wonderful design decision that caught my eye the second I encountered it: the way the game rewards your progress. Instead of a cute journal or notebook like the aforementioned games, your achievements are marked by stars in the sky.

The Garden Path to the stars

The first time I brewed a cup of tea at a forest firepit (itself an adorable system that has gameplay value), the camera turned up towards the sky and showed me my first star, awarded for making that first cuppa. Stars are linked in constellations, lending cottagecore vibes that fit well with the game's aesthetic and evoking the best part of camping or spending time outdoors on a summer night: looking up at the cosmos. Other games of its ilk have hinted at the universe above: sky reflections and star fragments, objects with astronomical flair, and so on. But I do very much want to look up and star gaze when I'm in these peaceful worlds, and this gives me the chance to do just that.

It also evokes a certain brilliant and perhaps forgotten aspect of Super Mario 64, where earning a star (in a less literal sense) came with a sometimes-vague hint about how to grab another one (or a few others, depending on how you go about the game). The Garden Path uses the system to hint at other star achievements, in a way that feels satisfying and even a tiny bit mysterious, like a lightly signposted adventure game puzzle. It's charming, it's effective, and it keeps me invested in this game's beautiful world.

Time will tell if The Garden Path will worm its way into my heart with quite the same intensity as Cozy Grove. But as I write this, I feel the itch to go check in on my garden—and on the stars above it.