Garden of the sea

Your beginnings on Garden of the Sea may be a little confusing. You’re dropped on an island, with a few panels for controls and that’s EVERYTHING. History is clearly up to you to write. We weren’t asking for much, but three lines to say what we’re doing there and what we should do would have been appreciated. In addition to panels explaining some controls, the tutorial island mainly shows you what will constitute the heart of the game: construction.

In various places there are small bubbles displaying one or more objects, which you must find or craft and release into the bubble. Once done, the item icon disappears so you know where you are. Once the conditions are met, the bubble disappears and the building is constructed.

You also have a machine for crafting construction elements, such as barriers, furniture or seed packets. You then need the recipe for the item, in the form of small square sheets scattered throughout the surrounding area. Luckily, building your base camp brings you a large sign to display them.

For all this, you need to explore the islands up and down, using a previously unlocked boat, to find the necessary ingredients, or grow them. You quickly unlock some tools for this purpose: spade, watering can, axe, fishing rod…. If you drop them in the water (yes, it will happen quite quickly), don’t panic: as soon as you unlock a tool, you can find it near your base camp, on a panel generating infinitely .

We can feel the legacy of VR coming through. Too much perhaps. In terms of controls, they are very (too much?) adapted to VR and not necessarily logical compared to other games of the style. Made you bend down and get up again. You grab an object with ZR and drop it with ZL. L and R allow you to scroll the bar of your objects and therefore the one you hold in your hand.

These control choices will create several problems: you will very often let go of what you have in hand instead of the desired action. Often in water. If you lose crafting recipes in this way, they will reappear, don’t panic. But we’ll have to find their respawn point, good luck.

Storage can also be a problem. ZL allows you to let go of the object, but also to store it nicely in certain pieces of furniture. But it’s really very random, from one second to the next, your logs will stop lining up to fall miserably at your feet and your bags will no longer want to be placed on the shelves.