This year I started a personal produce garden after feeling the burden of rising grocery prices. I figured growing some simple vegetables at home was a worthy investment and realistic enough to commit to. Starting was tough, but after 6 months I’m proud to have saved a few trips to the grocery store. I’m not intending on expanding my operation, but the fruits of my labor got me thinking about that charming fantasy of leaving behind the city, starting a farm, and living out in nature. Except, I like the city, and it’d be great if I could farm here. Thus, the Steam Next Fest demo for City Garden Harvest from Bajka Games caught my eye. A cozy farming simulator about building a lush paradise in a studio apartment was just what I was looking for. I had a great time at first, but City Garden Harvest left me wanting and needing more to keep playing.

City Garden Harvest Demo Synopsis

In City Garden Harvest you grow and cook plant-based products out of a beautiful apartment overlooking a futuristic city. Shop for seeds, gardening materials, and cooking ingredients, and view customer orders on your computer.

City Garden Harvest has a pretty complex and technical farming system atypical of a cozy game. It requires some resource management and organization to master. You first have to buy and read a book about new plants to learn about their ideal planting conditions. Then you can order the right sized pot, soil mix, and seeds. As plants grow, they diminish their soil, so fertilizers have to be regularly added to maintain the right levels of each nutrient. Each plant has a set life cycle that is affected by the conditions it is raised in. At the end of its life, the plant dies and has to be removed and replaced with a new seed.

Once you have harvested enough fruits and vegetables, you can head over to the kitchen to cook. Again, you have to buy and read books to unlock new recipes. Most recipes require additional ingredients that have to be ordered from the store. You can sell your raw harvest or turn them into a variety of dishes to sell at a higher price.

City Garden Harvest’s Stunning Visuals and Atmosphere

City Garden Harvest is a seriously gorgeous game especially for an indie demo. The lo-fi style music is chill and calming. Daytime shines fresh white light through the window, perfect for an early start. As evening approaches, the city lights up and the sun dims to a soft and relaxing orange glow. Bajka Games has taken full advantage of Unreal Engine 5 to create crisp textures and soft, dynamic lighting that exemplifies cozy vibes.

City Garden Harvest offers tons of customization options to turn the apartment into a cute and comforting home. Starting your garden doesn’t mean lining up 10 basic and boring beginner pots along your shelf. There are a variety of pot designs that let you start customizing your garden early without needing to progress more.

City Garden Harvest’s Unrealized Potential

City Garden Harvest is a buried seed full of potential that hasn’t quite anchored its roots yet. This demo sprouted a beautiful and explorative embryonic root into the nutritious depths of indie soil but hasn’t figured out what it wants to grow into. City Garden Harvest is looking in the right direction of the mechanics and customization of simulators, and the cozy vibes of casual games. However, it struggles to blend these elements cohesively into engaging gameplay.

Anti-Cozy Information Overload

I wanted to relax in City Garden Harvest, sprinkle seeds into a cute cat-shaped pot, prune delicious fruits, and cook a cozy cuisine. What I actually did was create lists, manage inventory, and read, read, read. Perhaps my experience was a result of my gaming personality as I love optimizing simulator games. However, compared to other cozy farming games, City Garden Harvest was more brain-intensive than expected.

The technical aspects of City Garden Harvest seemingly contradict its cozy vibes. The typical expectation of a cozy game is simple and intuitive mechanics: plant seeds, water plants, and harvest fruits and vegetables. However, City Garden Harvest’s farming felt overloaded and overwhelming at times. The gardening encyclopedia contains pages of numbers that list the growth and maintenance conditions of each plant. Before unlocking any new plants or recipes you have to read a book. When a pot is deficient in nutrients, a wall of warning icons pops up around it. A lot of items, including food, have weights which don’t seem to matter and just add more numbers to the user interface. I appreciate the technical aspects, but they don’t fit with the cozy vibes City Garden Harvest is aiming for.

The Fake Busy Problem

City Garden Harvest’s gameplay felt “fake busy” and was littered with unnecessarily complexities that artificially extended the time spent playing. There weren’t much interactive elements apart from clicking things to collect or place them around the environment. However, almost every click pops up a menu. Harvesting a strawberry from a potted plant? Click and hold until a loading cycle opens a menu of the plant’s inventory. Then click on the strawberry to move it into your inventory. Need to learn a new recipe? Click and hold a book to read it, but only if you are sitting down. So first run to a chair, click to sit, then read. Ordering and selling means visiting the kiosk in the outside hallway and clicking through its menu to pick up and deposit items.

I was constantly running in, out, and around the apartment to just click through menus. This was tedious and often broke the flow of the game. The added random obstacles exasperated this issue, such as needing to sit in order to read a book or drink coffee. Many actions that were a 2-10 second point-and-click ended up taking up 10-20 minutes of in-game time. Instead of these systems being easy and comfortable to use, they made the gameplay choppy and created a false sense of busyness.

Despite these issues, I was usually done with daily tasks 4-5 hours before the in-game day ended. However, there wasn’t much to do during this time. You can pass time by coding on your computer to make a little bit of money, but it was just another click and hold menu. The lack of gameplay after completing the main loop highlighted the most pressing issue in City Garden Harvest: the loneliness.

Feeling Lonely in an Empty World

After a couple hours of buying new furniture and growing bigger plants I expected to feel satisfied. Instead, I felt so… meh. I took a break from my screen and a single question rang through mind: why am I still playing? I thought back to my golden experience with another farming simulator, Stardew Valley. Both games follow the same basic and repetitive farming loop, but Stardew Valley felt so unique and different. Yes it had more content, but City Garden Harvest’s development will eventually expand its content too. Stardew Valley’s progression was more rewarding, but City Garden Harvest could also tweak its progression.

What was missing? Why did I stop enjoying City Garden Harvest?

Then it hit me. Stardew Valley has so much heart. I was invested in the characters, the story, and the world itself. There were friendships, rivalries, romances, heartbreaks, and so much more emotional depth outside of the farming itself. The coziness came from the soul beyond the gameplay. This realization, unfortunately, ultimately made me stop playing City Garden Harvest. The elevator never went down to the streets. I got orders from clients as text on my screen. I was always waiting for the doors in the hallway to swing open, but they never did. After finishing my daily tasks, all I could do was look outside the window to an empty world.

City Garden Harvest has the right atmosphere and aesthetic, but it lacks a lively world to be engrossed in. Life as an indoor gardener was lonely. I eventually stopped playing because I’d rather go tend to my garden in real life since City Garden Harvest had nothing more to offer.

Final Thoughts

I really want to like City Garden Harvest and I believe it has the potential to turn into a great game. The demo is visually stunning and the customization is rewarding. However, the farming system feels tedious and unnecessarily complex. Moreover, there’s no strong motivating force that keeps you gardening past the progression rewards. Nevertheless, City Garden Harvest has the potential to be grow into something great. I hope Bajka Games will nurture and treat it with care.

City Garden Harvest’s demo is no longer available as of this publication. It has a release date of sometime in Q4 2025.