A Hero And A Garden is a once upon a time, there was a princess trapped in a tower by an evil witch. A brave hero attempted to save her,A Hero And A Garden is a once upon a time, there was a princess trapped in a tower by an evil witch. A brave hero attempted to save her, unfortunately, things went awry when the Witch figured out what the hero was up to and cast him to garden in order to harvest berries in order to pay for the damage he caused to the local monster villagers. A Hero And A Garden is a visual novel title with a twist. The game has our young hero interact with a cast of quirky and unique characters. While some visual novels will have players make decisional choices in order to progress the story, A Hero And A Garden is a pretty straight forward affair. Unfortunately, none of the cast is likable. The two main characters both come off as annoying, arrogant dicks. It’s the first visual novel I’m glad there are no voiceovers. Given the game has the name garden in its title, you can assume where the twist is coming from. The Horns character will give our protagonist various seeds to grow and harvest up to five. So in between conversations, you have to press the corresponding buttons to each berry in order to harvest them. It’s as boring and mindnumbing as going through a decision-less visual novel because you can simply pick berries until the cows come home. Thankfully, you can hire an assistant to help you harvest berries, although at a much slower rate than the protagonist. Harvesting berries must be done in order to fulfill quests. On the right-hand side, there’s a Notepad like icon which represents the objectives to complete. Once you’ve picked up a set amount of a specific berry, the icon will turn blue indicating that an objective can be completed. Once you go into the Notepad icon and turn in the request, the doorbell will ring meaning you will have to go see what’s going on. The main problem here is that if you have multiple objectives ready to be fulfilled, you can only do one at a time because the game won’t let you do back into the Notepad and select another objective to complete unless you answer the door. As you complete objectives by harvesting berries, you’ll earn money. Once you have enough money, you’ll be able to access the Bookmark-like icon where you’ll be able to hire buddies and spend money to fix some of the damage to the village. You can also assign a buddy to a specific berry to harvest. A Hero And A Garden looks like a kid’s cartoon; oddly reminiscent of Caillou. It’s bright and colorful; a way to keep players’ attention on the screen as they zoom through the story and pick berries. The soundtrack is the most sleep-inducing score I’ve heard this year. It’s quite easy to space out and stop paying attention to what’s going on. And as mentioned above, the game is another visual novel lacking voiceovers. A Hero And A Garden is an easy pass. The lack of decision making makes it easy to not care about the story and conversations. Add the fact that you can’t complete multiple quests at once as you have to answer the door in-between is a cumbersome and questionable design and that the characters are far from likable, there’s no reason to play this game. Unless you want to button mash your way to infinite berries with your Xbox One controller...… Expand
