Voodoo Garden Review

Did that bat take a beehive?!?

Ready to tend to your lush farmland? Welcome to the swamp your hut sits on as it is ripe to grow plants to harvest. But, you don’t exactly sell what you harvest. Armed with a few recipes, the various critter parts, fruits, leaves, and so on can be combined to make various voodoo items to sell.

Armed with only a few plants, you work up your way up to getting more access to different plants and recipes with each level up. Three lanes are available to plant, the top for trees, middle for bushes, and the bottom for herbs. The beginning plants cost a decent amount but the more advanced ones will cost a lot, with the upgrades increasing the price. But these do contain ingredients for products that sell for higher price than what you start out with. As you get more and more plants you can plant, you will eventually lose space in front of your hut so it will be time to expand. Of course the price will increase with every expansion, but more space equals more cash. I do recommend putting ghosts on the expansions, as you will need to scroll to the side at this point, but I do believe bats only bother plants on your current screen.

Various animals will walk through your garden as they can also provide some ingredients. Of course, more variety will pass through as you level up as even lizards and dragonflies will eventually visit. But be careful of the bats! They will have no mercy to steal from yur garden! I believe the bats will link up to your spirits, as they will not take the mushrooms and bogroots until the spirits can. These will most likely be the ingredients you will be short of the most, including the beehives bees will leave behind. Luckily, there are ways to get more to spawn in forms of totems. Each totem having their own design to correspond to what they will attract when lit. Sadly these come way too apart. Snakes will be one of the earliest animals you need a lot of, but the totem for them don’t become available till to 20s levels.

An inventory is available, with limitations set. You have a set amount of each you can take in, with an upgrade increasing it, and once you try to harvest past it, those will be sold for one coin. Giving you a hint that you shouldn’t buy anymore of those plants if you keep with having more than you can carry.

But hey, you will not be the only one that can harvest. You can buy animals, starting with a rabbit before you unlock more by leveling up, that you can fatten up by feeding them their preferred food. But if this is going to take resources away from you, why do it? Permitting that you have available spots, you will get a prompt to sacrifice the animal once it is fully fattened up to turn them into a spirit. Forever slaved to your garden as they have to pick the various plants for you. This excludes the mushrooms and bogroots until you get the upgrade. If you place them by the plants they ate, they will also get a boost in growth speed. With the upgrades going to their plucking speeds.

So later game brings you to only needing to scare off bats and picking animal parts once the spirits come in to help. What else can there be? It will occasionally rain, making spirits disappear and animals stop coming around. Even the totems will be put out due to the rain, nullifying their affects. Making you pluck everything yourself on a moment’s notice to spice it up a bit. Before you know it, the rain will stop and everything will come back.

Voodoo Garden leaves you to your own devices without a tutorial or what anything does. I do wish it gave some indication of the different aspects, especially when your plants (and those who will be planted there) can diminish in production. It only took a while that bees planted a beehive there and noticed that bees are your savior, where previously I kinda freaked out thinking it would forever block the space as there were no recipes calling for beehives at that time.

Now this is not an idle game. While it does have idle aspects, Voodoo Garden is very much a clicker game and will only continue collecting and growing if it is running. With spirits helping out, you only need to click the bats and the animals walking by the plants, and even than there are recipes that do only require plant items.

Overall

+ Great visuals
+ Music
+ Simple

– Can get old, as there is no motivations other than to continue

For a game that I bought just because I liked Viridi, it really grew on me. It really is a great game to just zone out for a while and look at their colorful visuals and hear the music. If you’re an achievement hunter, they will be easy to get by just playing through once. I hope you make a prosperous garden.