The Garden Path offers a purposefully slow escape

The Garden Path begins with a message asking you to be careful when foraging plants in the real world and, as someone who spent their teenage years living in the middle of nowhere, trust me when I say this is good advice. (Sometimes you have to make your own fun, but eating too much marsh samphire can churn your stomach.) It's also fitting advice from a game where foraging plays a major role in cultivating your garden. You'll venture out into the storybook-styled wildness, snipping plant cuttings or collecting flower buds, before finding the right place to plant your seedlings and watch them grow.

Though, even with this knowledge in mind, the first hours of The Garden Path do feel a little directionless. Sure a tutorial will pop up occasionally and there's a hint about a mysterious note, but neither provide much overall guidance; the tutorial only appears when you encounter a relevant mechanic and the note being, well, a mystery. Due to this, I felt more like I was lost in the woods rather than exploring them when I first arrived in the garden, so I decided to craft my own path. In my inventory lay a pair of broken secateurs and on my map sat three question marks, making my quest one of investigating these three locations to see if any held the answer to fixing my tool.

It didn't take long to reach my first location where I met Augustus - a bear who happens to be a park ranger, which is odd considering I always thought bears like to eat those. Maybe Augustus is a vegetarian. Thankfully, it was a good thing I ran into Augustus because he had the other half of my secateurs and, for the price of some bracken sprigs, he helpfully fixed them! From there I ventured further into the garden where I met Larto, a buffalo who taught me how to fish, and Thom (strong Tom Bombadil vibes here) who sells seeds.

My equipment collection still felt incomplete though, so I embarked on another quest - obtaining a shovel, a tool for all kinds of social events. The problem I quickly discovered, however, was that neither bug nor fish I found matched the critter category Augustus wanted for the trade. Rather than spending more time hunting one down, I decided to see if I'd have better luck tomorrow - and I meant this literally, for time in The Garden Path passes alongside our own.

The Garden Path is tied, Animal Crossing-esque, to our own real world clock, with all four seasons passing you by in the spawn of 28 days. Every day you can potter about the garden tending to seedlings, foraging, fishing and greeting new visitors, be it Worm the frog who checks your compost, or Chashka who sells furniture. Having the seasons confined to roughly one month meanwhile ensures you can enjoy the whole scope of Garden Path's natural world without having to wait or time-travel. (Come on, we've all time-travelled in Animal Crossing at least once.)

It's a time frame which also perfectly suits how developer carrotcake has purposefully designed The Garden Path to be played in short bursts instead of long play sessions. You're meant to run out of things to do. You're meant to return the next day like I did to see if there are new items for sale or the prices have changed. You're always meant to have another reason to walk down the garden path. While this promises to transform The Garden Path into a charming sanctuary you can escape into, it also sprouts a troublesome thorn where the game relies on you both enjoying this gameplay style and, most importantly, remembering to play. But if you find this slower pace appealing, you'll discover that the garden is a canvas waiting to be painted with flowers you'll watch blossoming as the days roll by.