Tiny Garden now has a Steam demo in which you can grow plants and customise your Polly Pocket

rockpapershotgun.com:

Tiny Garden is a puzzle game about planting flowers and crops you can then sell to buy seeds for new types of flowers and crops. That would be charming enough on its own, but your agricultural endeavours are set inside a Polly Pocket-style toy, with crops also able to be exchanged for furniture with which to decorate your diorama home. After blowing past its Kickstarter target, there's now a playable demo.

It's only 20-minutes or so long, more of a "proof-of-concept" than a full demo, say the developers, with many unfinished features. It'll also only be available for the remainder of the Kickstarter pledge drive, which comes to an end on August 2nd.

That said, I've just played it and I had fun. Plopping down plants to modify adjacent tiles, to irrigate soil or grow grass, and thus create platforms for planting new types of seeds, is a satisfying challenge. It reminds me of Concrete Jungle, which used a similar system as the underpinnings of a citybuilder.

I'm also just in love with the presentation. I did not have Polly Pockets as a kid, or the so-called boy equivalent, Mighty Max, which swapped the makeup cases and domestic scenes for monster heads and creepy dungeons. We ignored such boneheaded gender essentialism with our own son and bought a sackful of old, secondhand Polly Pockets from eBay however, and he adored them. I must have spent dozens of hours hunched over them with him, acting out stories, our imaginations lit up by their intricate construction.

Matt beat me to covering Tiny Garden when it launched on Kickstarter earlier this month, but officially I'm writing about it again now because it's got a playable demo. Unofficially I'm writing about it so that I can say: a Polly Pocket mansion with a secret room behind a bookcase is infinitely cooler than a Mighty Max skull dungeon.