Wylde Flowers

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted June 18, 2025 on Steam What a fantastic and fun cozy game that I almost missed out on! I first came across Wylde Flowers back when it came out, and being someone who has played many games in this genre, I kind of overlooked it. I think mostly because I wasn't a huge fan of the sort of "bobbleheaded" look (that grew on me as I played though!). When they recently featured a bunch of cozy games here on Steam and Wylde Flowers was prominently shown as being an award winner, I decided to watch the trailer again and I'm so glad I did! This is one of the best in the genre in my opinion, and I don't say that lightly! [b]THE GOOD STUFF:[/b] [list] [*]Wylde Flowers is FULLY voice acted. Every line of dialogue is delivered by an incredibly talented voice cast. This is so impressive to me, because there is no shortage of dialogue in this game! I also very rarely heard duplicate voice lines though I spoke with the townspeople often. Most of the time, duplicate voice lines came from gift giving (seems each townsperson probably had two general responses to gifts so it was easy to get duplicates there). I really can't stress enough that the voice talent was really top notch here. [*]The story is genuinely really great. A lot of these cozy "village sim" games have a story but they tend to be a sort of vague, overarching story that doesn't feel super important to your overall daily activities. This game manages to keep a really engaging and interesting story going the whole time that involves what you are doing day to day. There are some genuinely sweet moments, some emotional beats even. Trigger warning/story beat spoiler - [spoiler]especially if you are dealing with recent grief of a parent or grandparent there's definitely some stuff in here that may cause you to get teary. I lost my Dad last year and it definitely got me full on crying.[/spoiler] The heart of the story is about how fear can change people that you otherwise know to be good and kind. [*]The addition of magic to this really keeps this interesting. It helps it stand apart from other games like it. It was super fun to deal with all the spells and potions that could help you be more efficient! [*]All (well, okay almost all) of the characters in this game are positive, likeable characters. They're also fully realized. Each of them feel like complete characters with distinct personalities. I grew to care about every single person in the town! Even the kids, which are characters that I think are often overlooked as individual people. [*]The music is top tier. There are a lot of really special moments in the game that are accompanied by fantastic music. And also just the sound design in general is very good. [*]The style grew on me! While it was initially the reason I probably overlooked it, I ended up really enjoying the cute and vibrant style of the game. [*]There is A LOT to do in the game. Tons of recipes. Tons of things to craft (including CLOTHING which is not something that many games in this genre include), tons of upgrades to your farm. There is no designing/decorating of your home space but that is a positive to me in this case. I think it can be a strong point for a game to not try to cram every single thing into it and instead to focus on a handful of things it wants to do well. [*]I "beat" the main story around the same time I finished my first full year in the game - around 42 hours in. I was very satisfied with what I had experienced at that point but the story actually keeps going past that point! There are still things happening with the town, with the people, and with your own life that is still interesting so you could certainly keep going. I've also read that you even get another villager in the second year and at that point there was still A LOT I had not unlocked (animals, recipes for cooking and crafting, farm upgrades). [/list] [b]THE NOT SO GOOD STUFF:[/b] [list] [*]You cannot 100% this without doing multiple playthroughs. This is really something very niche that only a few of us probably care about, but if you do like to 100% games, they made marrying each eligible townsperson a separate achievement. It would have made more sense to make getting married a single achievement. [*]Gaining recipes for cooking felt a little too random/uncontrollable. Some recipes you start with, or are given by quest. Some recipes you unlock by leveling up certain shops. But some recipes are fished up or dug up. These are the ones I have issue with. I spent A LOT of time fishing and digging in my 42 hours and still had SO many I couldn't get unlocked. My last 4 hours in the game were pretty much just me targeting a handful of recipes and trying to get them with little success. Since you need all the recipes for one of the achievements, this also makes doing a 100% a little bit of a pain. [*]That's it, and those are pretty minor complaints! [/list] [b]TLDR: Wylde Flowers manages to be one of the best cozy farm/village sim games I've ever played as a veteran of the genre[/b] If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more from me, I have a Curator page over at [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41107206/]Short Gal Plays Good Games[/url]
• Not recommended Posted July 14, 2025 on Steam I really, realllly wanted to like this game. With all of the representation, and all of the voice acting, with the witchiness and the farmsimness...I just couldn't do it. This game was originally created for Apple Arcade, and unfortunately, it really wears its past on its sleeve. I only made it to the very end of Spring. I had everything for the [spoiler] potion to change the season to summer [/spoiler], but I wanted to get some upgrades first. When I saw that the requirement for a bigger field would require 50 soil, I audibly gasped. I was only able to get one or two soil a day at that point, because my bottleneck in production was the limited number of weeds that would spawn (which are put in compost bins two at a time to make one soil, which takes a total of 24 in game hours). In a game that makes every action you take feel like an absolute chore, this is just awful. And I'm sure it's not limited to just that. The characters too. I've gathered from reddit post that there are characters that I have yet to meet, but the ones I have met are very one note. So one note that the small smattering of characters you're supposedly able to romance are just not interesting enough. That one lady is Jewish, that guy is South African. That white baker guy is gay, and he's engaged to that latino guy that makes jewelry. And that half-japanese person? Not only are they edgy, but they're non-binary. Please don't get me wrong here; I am a [i] massive [/i] supporter of diversity and queer representation. I am queer myself. But because [i] everyone [/i] is diverse, no one is. And everyone's dialogue has trapped them into their own boxes. The Jewish lady speaks in Yiddish every now and then but also talks about her Italianness every time you talk to her. The Middle Eastern doctor will talk to you mostly about how easy/hard her job is, when she isn't aggressively hitting on the protagonist. And the [i] protagonist. [/i] She would fit right into a bargain bin young adult fiction novel. She's sarcastic, think she's clever, and has to have a one-liner for everything. She is so hard to like, especially since the only clothes you get for her in the beginning makes it look like she's going clubbing. Maybe switch out those heels for something else while you're running a farm? Idk, just a suggestion. And finally, so I don't go down as an absolute hater, I'll be ending my criticisms with this final note: the game is [i] ugly. [/i] All of the characters have gigantic heads and hands, which is really off-putting. Everything in the world looks like a toy, but not in a good way. And when any kind of magic happens on screen, my frames take a beating, which is ironic because I've seen more impressive particle effects on a Gamecube game. I leave this review so others have another opinion. I foolishly saw the "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on this game, without having actually looked to far into the game. I could have gotten the demo, but I went right into it and paid $26 for this game, which is an [i] awful [/i] price. But I thought I would end up getting multiple hours out of it, to my chagrin. I see that the devs are creating another game set in the same Universe, and that's great. I wish them the best, and I may be on the lookout for a sequel, if they manage to fix everything I had complaints about. But for now, I cannot recommend Wylde Flowers, unless you are okay with wasting your time.
• Recommended Posted September 12, 2025 on Steam I have had Wylde Flowers on my wish-list for a painfully long time, and earlier this year played the demo. After completing the demo, I immediately got the full version. The team truly outdid themselves with this game and the storyline is so beautiful. My favorite part about this is the inclusivity. I never thought of it, but the team truly went the extra mile with the backstory of each character as well as Fairhaven in itself. The sounds and music in the game is relaxing and the tasks are oddly satisfying. I would most definitely recommend this to a cosy gamer, who enjoys farming with a touch of magic as well as a story filled with surprises and romance!
• Not recommended Posted September 27, 2025 on Steam Stardew Valley is a game I really love – comfortably my most played title on Steam – so I was hoping this would scratch the same itch, even if it would be asking a lot to imagine it could come close to the same standard. Unfortunately, that was far from my experience, and in fact almost without exception it just did not land for me. Not the most substantial issue, but the one which first set me off on the wrong track: the visuals. They seemed perfectly serviceable in the trailer and screenshots, but the in-game experience, and especially the regular close-ups, consistently triggered the uncanny register in my lizard brain, therefore feeling creepy and alien rather than the warm, cosy vibes you would hope for. This is made somewhat worse by the fact that almost none of the “neutral” expressions are relaxed, so you spend a lot of time looking at oddly frozen faces, adding to the unnatural tone. On top of that, in moments when they do become a little more animated, I found there to be a *massive* over-representation of the snarky raised eyebrow, to the point that everyone seems really obnoxious. It’s especially problematic given that multiple characters also have some degree of smirk permanently fixed on their face, so as someone who finds “Dreamworks face” off-putting rather than ingratiating, I often just felt that I didn’t want to spend time with these people. You might imagine the voice acting would bring enough warmth and humanity to overcome a good deal of the artificiality of these design quirks, but sadly I personally didn’t find that to be the case. I certainly appreciate the effort of having fully voiced dialogue, and I recognise this is a matter of individual preference, but I found several of the performances grating – and *especially* so the main character, which is of course the one you hear the most. As a result, it wasn’t long before I had simply muted the vocals. I had expected that I would really enjoy feeling like a part of the community, especially considering the obvious efforts to reflect some of the diversity which makes the world a richer place. However, this representation feels so on-the-nose and overt as to come across as box-ticking, and there was never a moment that I felt like I was joining a genuine, organically formed neighbourhood. Another contributing factor to this is that, as different as they may be on the surface, I felt like almost every character predominantly speaks with the same authorial voice, making it more like an artificial hive-mind than a group I could see myself integrating with. As a final note on the community aspect: the devs evidently wanted to include something akin to a faith group, but presumably wanted to stay away from anything with the slightest Judeo-Christian echo to avoid potentially alienating a large part of the key demographic. So instead, they made the frankly baffling decision to include an unmistakable, intentional parallel for a scientology centre, even making the leader of the local chapter into a potential romance. About half of the community are drinking the Kool Aid, and so will regularly try to convince you how wonderful it is… feeling welcome yet? It blows my mind that the same design document which 100% literally included a list of ethnicities to ensure nobody was overlooked in their super-cosy vision also included “Cutesy version of heinous exploitative cult (sexy leader?)” and everybody involved just went along with it. That’s about 600 words, and I didn’t actually mention the gameplay yet. Well, it’s… fine. Just about. It’s extremely shallow, mostly very generic, and though nothing is noteworthy for being done particularly well, there’s also no major problems apart from the simplicity of it all. Several times, I found myself thinking I was looking at a mobile game which had pushed out the boat a bit on production values. It’s resolutely… acceptable. What I wouldn’t consider acceptable is the glaring balance issues. The game economy genuinely seems to be random. If you catch a fish, it might describe itself as common, rare, or even epic – but that seemingly has no bearing whatsoever on how likely you are to encounter it or how much it sells for. Restorative and monetary values of recipes likewise seem to have been randomly assigned – and there is one recipe in particular, made from 2 cheap ingredients that are available in unlimited supply, which inexplicably sells for a vast profit. It seems like no attention to detail at all has been paid in this area. The same is true, and at much more detriment to the player, in the case of some resources – above all, soil. To craft soil requires randomly spawning weeds, around 2 or 3 of which typically appear each day, and 2 of which are required for each unit. It is agonisingly slow to accumulate, despite often being used in recipes and constructions, some of which require huge amounts. For example, the *first* expansion to your vegetable garden requires 50, and the *first* expansion to your barn another 40. I couldn’t tell you about later expansions, because I didn’t make it that far. It’s interminable. All of the above might seem more than enough to throw in the towel, but I was still willing to give the game a chance to see how it handled the romantic aspect. In one of the fairly early interactions, there was some flirtatious behaviour and dialogue which felt surprisingly authentic, which had actually impressed me, so I still had some optimism. I began to imagine that all the areas in which the game was lacking might have been because the dev focus was on these relationship events, and so I decided it was worth going a little further down that route to see how it went. Well… I didn’t make it very far. The *first* thing my prospective partner did on our *first* date was to say, “I really like you! I want to get serious!” – before I’d even had a chance to take a mouthful of food! I was offered 2 responses: either to agree with his frantic urgency to “get serious”, or to say no. Easy choice! And, as it turned out, I crushingly slammed him into the friend zone in the process. Which felt like a fitting point to abandon any attempt at a relationship with this game.
• Recommended Posted November 23, 2025 on Steam i bought this game both for Switch and for PC and have played it twice now. It is such a great game. So polished, so enjoyable. I think everyone should play this game. My only critiques are incredibly mild and really just have to do with wanting more from the game: - I wish the hair salon was available significantly earlier. Same thing with clothes and jewelry but the hair being locked until Summer Year 2 is BONKERS - I wish there was more to marriage. I want Tara to be able to have kids and reno Hazel's room. Honestly, this is the only part of the game that feels lacking and almost as if the devs intended to have more content here but didn't include it. There is such a focus on grief and adult themes that sanitizing marriage feels so odd - for example getting a "Boop" from your spouse when other games at least let you kiss them, it frankly gives me the ick Other than that, a near perfect game
• Recommended Posted June 19, 2025 on Steam Most of the time I am excited to 100% a game, but this time I found myself really sad, actually. After 96 hours of living in this witchy little town, I still didn't want it to be over. I have played dozens of farming sim games, going all the way back to Harvest Moon 64, and this is easily my favorite of all time. The art is great, but it's the music and voice acting that seal the deal for me. The many quality of life features (like unlimited inventory) freed me up to focus on the story, raising my crops, and taking care of my animals. I found the game relaxing but just challenging enough to be interesting, on the medium time speed setting. If you are a fan of farming sims, witchy games, and/or cozy games, this is a must-play. Gorgeous, gorgeous game. I also just want to add that it is so refreshing to see a game not have any DLC other than their soundtrack. I am old-school and believe that every item in a game should be earnable in-game. So many farming sims offer extra outfits, etc, as paid DLC, but Wylde Flowers has a huge amount of cosmetics, all included in the base game.