Credits: carrotcake
Announced to widespread excitement and achieving 125% funding on Kickstarter in 2021, The Garden Path has become a standout in the early wholesome game movement. This slice-of-life simulation game, with its hand-drawn storybook visuals and uniquely wistful yet hopeful spirit, invites players to appreciate the small moments in gardening, making new friends, and finding new life in old things. Designed for short, leisurely play sessions, the game progresses in real time, offering new travelers, events, and activities each day. The Garden Path will launch on Steam, Itch.io, and Nintendo Switch on July 30.

Want to try? Wishlist on Steam today, or explore the garden in the limited-edition early access on Itch.io.

Far from the pressure of the world, you find yourself a new wilderness. Your guide: a cryptic message and the hope of a simpler existence.

The Garden Path explores the quiet moments of a life well lived, where your garden will grow to reflect both the passing of time and your own desires. Time here runs in concert with the real world, and the passing of seasons heralds new encounters and a new story to weave.

Above all, The Garden Path is a life sim that celebrates the tranquil, the melancholic, and the pensive, and a safe space to shape and grow as you like.

• Designed with short play sessions in mind; enjoy 10-30 minutes of daily errands, visitors, and more to explore, with real-time progression even when you’re away.
• Cultivate plants, whistle to charm song-fish, design your home, and help your new friends — play your way, and focus on what you enjoy.
• Meet an endearing troupe of travelers who will come and go, and a playful cast of vegetable-headed residents each with their own stories to tell.
• Piece together a whimsical history as you discover the secrets of the Garden.
• Lush illustrated visuals and a twinkling day/night soundtrack to complete your stay.
• Invite another to join you in local co-op mode and nurture your garden together.

A Garden Grown Your Way

Designed to be played as and when you wish, The Garden Path features a wealth of stories, activities, and distractions to be experienced at your own pace. Don’t have time to watch your flowers grow? Come back tomorrow: time in the garden passes alongside the real world, and you’ll find plants you nurtured one day may bear fruit the next.

You won’t be alone in your new home. Charming inhabitants will come and go, from Bunk, the tea-brewing macaque to Larto, a Greenlandic Musk Ox with a penchant for song-fish. You may even find some visitors willing to make their home alongside your own!

A Safe Space

The world of The Garden Path was designed with comfort in mind. Although a quiet and tranquil experience of flowing streams, gentle breezes, and interesting characters, it is a safe space where reflection, and the potential melancholy that comes with it, are encouraged.

A Feast for the Eyes

With a hand-drawn aesthetic unlike any other, The Garden Path’s stunning visual design embraces you from the start, inviting you into its world of low-fi pleasures. Combined with a soothing original piano soundtrack, it won’t be long before you’re lost in the flow of a simple life.

Founded in Bristol, UK in 2016 by illustrator Louis Durrant, carrotcake previously developed the beautiful European fable Crossing to the Cold Valley, and Kingdom Ka, an abstract retelling of the world’s oldest stories, prior to their ongoing work on The Garden Path. Durrant is a one-person development team, whose primary goal is to build spaces that people want to exist in. With The Garden Path, that mantra can be seen in every facet of the game. Growing up watching the Moomins and Studio Ghibli films, Durrant credits both works as inspirations for The Garden Path.

Mooncat began as a natural evolution out of Player Two PR, founded in 2016. The agency provides PR and marketing support to a range of indie clients, and has built a small but very dedicated team of marketers (and friends!) around the world. Our team began to offer additional services and profit-sharing agreements, just to make it possible to help excellent teams make lovely games. Before we knew it, we had signed three gorgeous indie titles, and Mooncat Games was born.