What an amazing adventure puzzle game! It looks beautiful and will look better and better the further you get with restoring the areas. It has no missable achievements and takes around 10 to complete.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: ~10 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
I’m blown away by how amazing Garden Trills is. I expected a cute game where you play as a bird and do simple tasks. It has that + so much more. It is an adventure puzzle game. You clean up areas, visit neighbors, and mostly plant new plants which each have their own function. Those plants and figuring out what you need is what you’ll do the most during this game. Flying around with food or bomb kinda items to find a way toward your next objective.
I’m surprised by how such a simple story of a young bird who just moved with her parents makes so much sense in the objectives. You need to restore some stuff and talk with a lot of new neighbors. What story-wise is so well done is that as a young bird, you can’t fly far. So without holding an item, you can fly for about 7 to 8 seconds or so, but when holding an item that time goes down so much and you have to find other ways to get there or need to find spots to take a break and restore (which takes like a second) your strength. It felt to me during the game as if the bird got better at flying, but it turns out that I got better at flying, the game didn’t change. However, that felt even more fitting for a young bird on an adventure.
What is a nice touch is the amount of customizable items the game offers. there are so many hats and backpack varieties you will unlock in different colors so you can design the bird you like and if you get bored of the look, there is plenty more to choose from. I’m also very impressed by how the flowers look. They are just beautiful, wherever you plant them.
Garden Trills has a lot of amazing QoL features. Like a detailed map where you can find all the neighbors, at the map you can see how many neighbors you have visited and how many are there in total, as well as how many collectibles are in each area. It also gives you plenty of seeds so you can experiment and don’t have to be afraid not to have enough seeds. You can also pick up planted seeds to make room for others or to have that seed back to plant somewhere else, in the extremely rare case you’re missing a seed you need. After finishing the story you get an item that will tell you when a collectible is close, very nice to find the ones you missed.
And speaking about QoL features. The achievements have counters. So on Steam, you can see your progress for the achievements where you have to do something X amount of times. None of those achievements are missable. The main story takes around 3 to 4 hours if you would only focus on that, completing the game is around 10 hours or so.
Looking back, I think if you want to complete the game as quickly as possible, you should first mostly focus on the main story and clean up the rest afterward. However, I just had an amazing time flying around, doing everything I saw around me, not worrying about how quick I was. So that is totally fine as well.
There are achievements for visiting all neighbors, finding all collectibles and finding all the different plants and their color variation. you’ll find all the different color variations by finishing all the quests as well as destroying old plants that were already in the area before you entered, so you get those seeds as well. Finding the last few collectibles can be a challenge, but keep an eye out for shiny objectives and after the story, you unlock an item that will make a sound the closer you get to a collectible. Each map also will tell you how many you’re missing, The maps are still big but at least you know where to find the missing ones. I’m very grateful the developer didn’t add an achievement for finishing every area with flowers, but just the main hub (home garden).
For me, Garden Trills is almost the perfect game. A fun and lighthearted adventure with a lot to do and without the need of a guide or missable/grindy achievements. I give Garden Trills 4.5 out of 5 stars.
This review for Garden Trills was written on 11 December 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 34 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.
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