Gourdlets Review

What a beautiful and cozy sandbox-building/designing game. The like guys will interact with (almost?) every item, so cute! It has no missable achievements and unlocking them all takes around 15h.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 1h active play + around 14h idling
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide. However, this is a great guide.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: 1 achievement is quite time-consuming if you go only for the achievements
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Gourdlets is an amazing decoration game. You can decorate the land but also the inside of the houses. You summon the little guys by requesting them through a train system and they will interact with almost all the items you place inside and outside. So if you build a swing, they will swing on it. Build a clothesline for laundry, they will hang up the laundry. Place down a crop, they will tend to it so it grows. Placing down a bed, and a Gourdlet will sleep in it.

The artwork in Gourdlets is so beautiful with so much detail. You can even change the colors of items and Gourdlets! What adds to the cozy feeling this game gives me is the day and night cycle and in the evenings all the lights that turn on. However, even during the day the game feels cozy with all the Gourdlets running around and doing stuff. This also contributed to your land not feeling empty. you can decide how many Gourdlets to let arrive in your game by just calling the train for more Gourdlets.

I was very surprised but happy to see that Gourldets got Steam Achievements. In so many sandbox-building games you don’t have achievements. I’m not good at designing a beautiful area but it was so much fun to play this game. And with how good everything already looks on its own it is still possible to make a beautiful area even if you lack the real skills to design it.

If you want to play Gourdlets only for the achievements, then 90% of them can be unlocked in an hour or less. There is one achievement that takes long and that is to unlock everything. As for this, you need Gourdlets to mature, and this costs time. I kept my game running for around 14 hours before I got there. However, if you just enjoy designing the area, I can see how you get way more active gameplay time out of the game and it might not feel like a grind at all.

I give Gourdlets 4 out of 5 stars.

This review for Gourdlets was written on 20 Augustus 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 10 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.