Reap What You Sow
HIGH It’s nice to learn what various plants look like.
LOW The pointless plot…
WTF …Which somehow leads us to Cromwell’s Republic
It is the year 1643. Agnès Duchemin has arrived at an empty abbey in Port-Royal-des-Champs, a real-life location in the French countryside. She gazes at the mossy walls and contemplates the serene quiet, while the bees and many insects making it their home buzz welcomingly. The reason for her visit? To restore the abbey’s garden.
The setting of The Abbess Garden is indeed as peaceful as I would imagine a abbey to be. Supporting this, and the first thing that struck me, is the soundtrack. From the start menu, we can listen to beautiful melodic music that sets the cozy mood, and it continues through strolls between the bushes and rows. Sometimes a scene breaks into silence and we’re left with just the chirping of the birds. It’s a nice touch, as it sets the right ambiance for a gardening experience in an empty abbey from the 17th century.
There is much to do. Agnès examines the plants and ground, waters the plants, digs, sows, replants, adds soil, harvests, records an inventory and collects each specie. Naturally, different plants need different conditions like specific soils, specific water quantities, different periods to grow, and some need to be planted near other species. If we let the plants die, it’s game over. The Abbess Garden is thus a gardening simulator… but not quite.
Beyond our work with plants, we speak with several characters such as abbess Angélique, Monsieur François, grumpy villager Gosse and some musketeers. All the chitchat unveils a mysterious plot that links the abbey with the political strife happening in France and England. While combining gardening with mystery solving starts out as an interesting premise, it’s a shame, then, that it ends up being inconsequential.
I understand that often, the point of adding a plot completely unrelated to the themes of gameplay is to ease the monotony and repetitiveness of the gardening rituals, but the narrative here (without spoilers) ended dull and there’s little for us to really care about. Further distancing us from the narrative, our character doesn’t have the elements to be the hero of the story either, and offers the player no impact.
We can’t make any dialogue choices that affect the plot, nor we can perform any action to change the destiny of the characters. At certain points, characters will ask us to look for clues in the garden that might unravel the political mystery, but the search becomes meaningless from the moment that we realize all of the objects we should be looking for are not hidden — they shine brightly in plain sight — and the game is linear and doesn’t let us advance until we complete these too-easy tasks. This added political plot is essentially reduced to being a mere reading exercise.
If the intention was to use these larger events to engage the player, The Abbess Garden should have provided either a more active dialogue system, or more simply, a script more directly related to the gardening themes, where we could learn more about the plants and keep focused on the main activity. Instead, the developers seemed to try for something that the game was never going to be.
Putting the narrative aside, even the gardening sim elements fall short. Mechanically, The Abbess Garden follows the formula of doing the gardening tasks, talking with people, and then pressing a button to forward time. Repeat.
This formula isn’t enough for us develop a strong interest in things because it lacks the kind of refinement that would make us more interested. For instance, the design of the space doesn’t convey the feeling of being a garden, or even an abbey. The garden is small (not necessarily a bad thing) and the collection of plants we have access to is limited to just fifteen, which does not feel like enough for a gardening title. We can’t zoom in or zoom out, and we can’t pan the camera, which limits our visual appreciation of the garden, not to mention the frustration of being unable to clearly see a plant that’s behind another and we keep on clicking the wrong one.
Also, the movement of Agnès is slow. Maybe the studio was trying to portray a delicate mademoiselle thoughtfully strolling in a garden, but it’s too slow. There is an option to speed up her movement, but then her animation becomes unnatural and clumsy. There are also moments of lag, like when clicking a button to perform an action and our character doesn’t respond right away.
The Abbess Garden could have been an opportunity to combine gameplay and education, offering a learning experience about plants. It could have also been an opportunity to discuss political events through the frame of someone in a distant garden, but neither of these possibilities were accomplished, and both feel frustratingly incomplete due to the story being inconsequential and the information given about plants being oversimplified.
The Abbess Garden could have been a pleasant experience, and it has indeed pleasant elements, but it lacks both engaging gameplay and an engaging story — there’s nothing here to bind it all together. As it stands, the best part of the experience is watching our plants grow, from seed to flower, and customizing our garden, but it’s just not enough. Hopefully, MD Studio uses this game as a sketch for a more compelling project next time. It’s a shame, because the right ideas and ingredients are here, but maybe they’ll find more success in another game, in another abbey.
Rating: 3.5 out of 10
Buy The Abbess Garden – PC
Disclosures: This game is developed by MD Studio and published by indie.io. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 8 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: As of press time, this game was not reviewed by the ESRB. This game is suitable for all ages. It’s a gardening game without sensitive content.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. The only audio this game uses are the soundtrack and environmental sounds. This game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.
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