A Hero and a Garden is a visual novel/clicker release from Ratalaika Games and npckc on PS4. Check our A Hero and a Garden review!
In A Hero and a Garden from Ratalaika Games and npckc, you will take on a visual novel/clicker mix on PlayStation 4. In this one, you will take on a classic story of “an evil witch has kidnapped the princess, so you must give it your all to save her from the tower she’s trapped in.” Things, unfortunately, don’t go as planned, and after your hero takes on this particular quest, it will end up doing a lot of damage to the monster village. Because of this, he’ll be forced to repair everything he has destroyed.
And what’s the twist for this classic story? To be able to complete this particular task, you have to harvest many berries from a garden so that you can earn enough money to save up and pay for the costs for each of the repairs that are needed to complete the game. You will start with just the one bush that will produce berries at a steady pace, but as you progress through this quest, you will unlock more plants from which you can get berries of other varieties.
This is when the clicker elements kick in since you’ll have to press a button to collect the available berries so that more can be produced by each of the unlocked plants. You will get requests for collecting X, Y, or Z berries. Once you have enough, you can select to fulfill that request, earning some money for your efforts. This money can be used to get yourself an assistant to help you automatically collect berries from one plant, but the main objective will be to get enough money to pay for the repairs that are needed to bring the village back to what it used to be before your adventure.
As you sell the berries, you will interact with a cast of characters, and it is here that the visual novel elements kick in. You’ll be reading many lines of dialogue, as is to be expected from a visual novel game. For visual novels, since there’s a lot of text to read, the story is the one that should be the best and most rewarding element of the overall experience, but that’s not the case for A Hero and a Garden. The story for this particular release did not manage to stand out and is one that didn’t stick with me after it was over.
A Hero and a Garden has a full trophy list with a Platinum trophy waiting for you. There are trophies for completing all requests for each of the five types of berries in the game, for obtaining enough money to be able to cover the costs of each of the five repairs that are required of you, and then five trophies tied to endings. The trophies for the endings are technically missable, but if you save near the end of the game before you purchase the last repair, you can end up reloading that save to select each of the characters to get all of the endings.
A Hero and a Garden is a visual novel that mixes things up with some clicker elements, but neither the visual novel side nor the clicker side manages to do a good job of standing out, which makes this a hard one to recommend. It does have a Platinum trophy, which is something that trophy hunters should keep in mind. A Hero and a Garden is out on PS4 with a $4.99 price.
Disclaimer
This A Hero and a Garden review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Ratalaika Games.
https://ratalaikagames.com/
