Garden Trills First Impressions: A Chirpy Adventure

I am a simple woman. I see a birb game, I play the birb game. So I played the Garden Trills demo game and I must say the developer did a swell job in the gameplay and visuals department. You play as Tomi, a cute little sparrow exploring the floating gardens of her new neighborhood. While exploring, you will be meeting new birb neighbors, and helping them complete quests. Since it’s also a garden-themed game, you can grow magical flowers, and use them to complete certain quests.

• Garden Trills is now available on Steam. It was released on December 12, 2024.

The first few moments of gameplay were pure bliss. As little Tomi, experiencing the world for the first time, I was introduced to the new neighborhood by mama birb. Dad birb gave me my first quest – giving gifts to neighbors, and in return, I received cool hats and accessories. There were also a few quests, such as planting seeds and watering to grow flowers.

The game’s controls are intuitive and user-friendly. WASD keys move Tomi and pressing the left and right mouse buttons lets you interact with nature elements and objects. Pressing and holding the space bar will make her fly. However, flying won’t be easy in the beginning. I could flap my wings for a few seconds before descending. The flying meter beside the sparrow decreases the longer she flutters in the air. Once the flying meter goes completely down, she stops flying and it takes a few seconds to recharge the meter again to fly.

I liked the clever use of the environment to complete quests. Since I could fly only for a limited time and up to a certain height, I could use flowers to my advantage to propel the birb higher up, especially if I needed to fly to hard-to-reach areas. I just had to move closer to a flower and press the mouse button to plop in the flower. Once inside the flower, I could move it to get the right direction and press the mouse button again to “eject” the sparrow high up.

The demo has only 3-4 short quests, and I so wanted to play more. One of the most cherished gameplay moments was Tomi and her parents working together as a team to complete quests. Tomi is so smol, she can’t lift the watering can alone, so all I did was make her sing to call her mom and now both can lift the can and water the plants.

There was another instance of teamwork when Tomi needed her parent’s help to open the patio umbrella. It’s moments like these that leave a lasting impression and make the game stand out.

Garden Trills is the much-needed wholesome game in my life. I am a big fan of games played from an animal’s perspective, and I enjoyed playing Little Kitty Big City. Playing from a cute sparrow’s perspective was a completely different experience. Created by Yukim, the game releases in December 2024. You can download the demo now or wishlist on Steam.