Garden Paws Is Minecraft But Also Animal Crossing

Slice-of-life simulation games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and open-world exploration games like Minecraft have been growing in popularity in recent years. With numerous indie and AAA titles releasing games that mimic or integrate popular mechanics like cooking, farming, crafting, and character customization, players can spend as much time battling against enemies as they can building a homestead or gathering forageable items. Garden Paws, recently released for the Nintendo Switch, combines all the joy of building a town and customizing a home with the exploration and excitement of adventure and combat, and it can be done while playing as an adorable, customizable creature.

Garden Paws begins like many slice-of-life titles, with the player inheriting a small, run-down homestead next to a neighboring town. Players must forage an ever-changing open-world map for items like flowers, rocks, wood, and fruit that can then be sold at the shop next to their home. The world of Garden Paws is made up of large landmasses that can be traveled to by building bridges, sailing on ships, or swimming across bodies of water. Like Animal Crossing, players must upgrade the town they live beside in order to gain access to many needed shops, and this will require a number of interesting quests to be completed for the town’s cast of quirky NPCs.

While Garden Paws doesn’t offer a procedurally generated map like Minecraft, the world does change as the player progresses in the story. When first starting out, only a few species of flowers and forageable goods will be available for players to locate. However, as quests are completed and new shops are opened in town, numerous species of flowers, forageable food items, and explorable areas become available, continually offering new and fresh exploration opportunities that keep the Garden Paws map interesting. There is also a large area that can only be unlocked later in gameplay, introducing a new area when the original map becomes repetitive or lacks opportunities for the player.

Garden Paws Uses Many Mechanics From Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers players the ability to create a unique island town with the use of decorations, town upgrades, and villager invitations. Garden Paws has integrated many of the same aspects, but with a different twist. Instead of playing as the only human in the town, players can pick between 10 different species. These include creatures like dragons, badgers, and cats. The character can be customized with a base set of skins, and hundreds of new options can be unlocked during gameplay. Players can change their species’ appearance at any time through the game’s menu. There are also a number of different clothing items like hats, dresses, wings, and sweaters that can be worn to further customize character looks. Like Animal Crossing, players can build furniture and customize their personal homes, as well as any areas around the vast map, through the crafting menu and workbenches.

While New Horizons includes hundreds of potential villagers for players to invite to their islands, and a handful of witty NPCs like Blathers, Tom Nook, and Celeste, Garden Paws has taken the personalities of NPCs a few steps further. Instead of limiting NPCs to personality types like Cranky, Lazy, or Peppy, each NPC has a unique set of traits, allowing them to stand out from each other. They also each possess a quest line that reveals their desires as a character, as well as backstories that flesh out their personalities. Frank the Carpenter is a grumpy, busy-body who would rather be left alone, but continuously gets roped into favors by those living in the town. Meanwhile, Mr. Mooney the cow breeder is a stingy and ruthless businessman who sends the player on quests for his needs, rather than doing things himself. Each new NPC brings life to the town, making it more enjoyable and rewarding to visit.

Garden Paws Includes Farming, Combat, And Upgrades Like Minecraft

Like in Minecraft, cultivating a sustainable source of food is important to keep stamina up. Players can grow a variety of foods including tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, and carrots – among many other varieties. It is also possible to collect seeds and saplings for fruit trees and bushes, as well as build apiaries to keep bees for honey. Alongside the agriculture mechanics, players can also keep cows and chickens, and tame a variety of helpful wild animals including bears, foxes, cats, and ferrets. By harvesting crops and collecting animal products, players can cook dishes to sell for a profit or eat to regain stamina. Keeping a handful of cherry pies on hand can be specifically helpful when tackling the dungeons, as much like Minecraft, the caves are filled with dangerous enemies that can quickly deal damage when found in large mobs.

Garden Paws also utilizes a number of crafting tables specific to certain tasks, rather than a single table for every need. Players will have access to a standard workbench for crafting basic farm items, but they will also need to craft a furnace, a furniture workbench, a storage workbench, a flower workbench, and a cooking station in order to craft the wide variety of items needed around the farmstead and for quests. While the number of different stations seems intimidating when first setting up, the overall design keeps each category of advanced items separate, making the UI clean and easy to navigate when crafting. This is very similar to Minecraft’s satisfying crafting system and is intuitive and simple for those who have used the many crafting stations either in Vanilla or in mods.

While Garden Paws doesn’t have the refined graphics of Animal Crossing and lacks the unique world seeds of Minecraft, those who have enjoyed either game may find the indie title an interesting and fresh take on the slice-of-life and exploration genres. There are many areas that Garden Paws has room to improve, like the variety of colors for furniture, and the styles available for clothing, but hopefully future updates will continue to release content. Doing so could make the variety of gameplay options in Garden Paws exceed other games in the genre, and potentially allow it to compete with similar AAA titles.

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