Amelia’s Garden

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Tell Me Your Story Games Collection, along with Cook for Love and Tell Me Your Story.)

Amelia’s Garden, released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch and ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2025, is a family-friendly game that’s hard to pin to a genre, but the closest one I can think of is Puzzle, with players trying to piece together the parts of broken pottery on a rooftop yard and then growing various plants to transform the location into a rooftop garden.

This game’s presentation is lovely, using 2D visuals in a hand-drawn art style, backed by energetic acoustic guitar music. All of this combines to create a very relaxed and down-to-Earth vibe that’s really wonderful.

When it comes to the gameplay itself, you’ll start by repairing pottery like a jigsaw puzzle, which is nice but it doesn’t take long to complete and it’s not very challenging. After that, you’re just made to do tedious busywork that requires no brainpower or skill whatsoever – use a cursor or the touchscreen to click on a pile of dirt and then the pot to fill it, then move the cursor up and down to shake a bag of seeds, then press and hold a designated pair of buttons until a bar fills up before clicking a few times on the plant to shake off some of its fruit.

Of all of this, the only part that actually feels like gameplay is the pottery repair part, and that’s over very, very quickly. Everything else just seems pointless, like it’s trying to fill in time, and almost nothing you do even matters.

What’s more, as short as the pottery repairs are there’s only twenty of them, meaning you would be done with this game very quickly if it didn’t keep shoving the tedious busywork at you.

If this game just stuck with the pottery repair stuff, and gave players bigger pots with more pieces to repair, Amelia’s Garden could have at least been a decent Jigsaw Puzzle-style game. Instead it’s just brief bits of decent gameplay in between massive amounts of time wasting. I value my time more than this, and you should too – do not bother with this game.

tl;dr – Amelia’s Garden is a family-friendly has players repairing pottery in gameplay that’s roughly like a Jigsaw Puzzle, and then fills up space by forcing players through a series of tedious tasks. As a result, there’s very little actual gameplay here. I recommend you skip this game.

Grade: D+

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