Garden Story is a game about kindness, exploration and restoration. Eurogamer.net If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy. Garden Story is a game about kindness, exploration and restoration. Grape expectations. Feature by Christian Donlan Features Editor Published on 2 Mar 2020 3 comments This weekend I fell in love with a blueberry. Then I realised it was a grape, so I guess I fell in love with a grape. In Garden Story, a sort of town-rebuilding RPG for PC and Mac, with dungeons and beautiful chunky pixel art and a sweet nature, you play as Concord, a grape with a mission of regeneration. The demo was available on Steam over the last few days, while the game itself is out sometime in Spring. This is fairly well-travelled territory by now, but it doesn't stop Garden Story being wonderful. Your job is to restore a town to prosperity, harvesting stuff, clearing stuff up, knocking about gooey purple enemies known as the Rot. In the demo, you visit a new area that has fallen into ruin, do a few favours for a few people and then rattle through a mini-dungeon where simple combat combines with sokoban puzzles. Push those crates! Combat and harvesting are all handled the same way: you have a weapon of some kind and you hit stuff. There's a stamina gauge to watch and enemies strike back every now and then, but the demo at least is very gentle. Alongside the stick I was hitting stuff with I also got a sickle by doing a solid for a lazy tomato, and there's a dowsing rod, which is essentially a fishing rod, that allows you to do damage too. Damaging people with a fishing rod! The combat's great and the dungeoning is fun, and as ever with these things there is a simple pleasure to exploring the tumbledown world and thinking about how nice it will be when you fixed it. But there's more to Garden Story too. My favourite element of the demo is probably the literature stuff: you can cash in leftover resources back at the shack where you sleep and they're turned into lost books for the town library, each one telling you about this place one page at a time, with missing pages tempting you to go back out and find the resources that will fill them in. The demo's not huge but still, I lost myself in this world a little bit. A perfect Sunday afternoon diversion, which left me intrigued and feeling slightly kinder to the world at large. Spring cannot arrive soon enough, frankly. Become a Eurogamer subscriber and get your first month for £1 Get your first month for £1 (normally £3.99) when you buy a Standard Eurogamer subscription. Enjoy ad-free browsing, merch discounts, our monthly letter from the editor, and show your support with a supporter-exclusive comment flair! Support us View supporter archive More Features Digital Foundry Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090: a new level in graphics performance The Digital Foundry video review - and how the new GPU champion delivers for 4K 120fps gaming. 12 Feature Evercore Heroes wants to wind people up the right way "There's less rage at them, because they didn't end your fun." Feature What games get wrong about horses And what they could do about it. 34 Feature Shout out to all the Overwatch supports - where would we be without you? Merci. 55 Latest Articles Preview Football Manager's new Console edition is the best you'll get without a PC Getting Touch-right. Splatoon 3 Amiibos will be out next month Ink-coming! 3 Fans think Phil Spencer's shelf is teasing the Xbox Game Pass streaming box UPDATE: Xbox confirms old Keystone prototype. 59 Modder dives into Demon's Souls files following PS5 jailbreak, discovers fabled Ring of the Chieftain Who knows what's nexus? 4 Supporters Only Premium only Off Topic: Take a minute to appreciate Cookin' with Coolio's incredible scallops recipe. What a great book. Premium only Off Topic: Reading City of Glass in comic form "Where exactly am I going?" Premium only Off Topic: Il Buco is a transporting film about a really big hole Underlands. Off-Topic Netflix handled Sandman brilliantly It was Dreamy. 9 Buy things with globes on them And other lovely Eurogamer merch in our official store! Explore our store