Our Verdict
Pocket Oasis is a gorgeously serene gardening simulator, where the aim of the game is to simply kick back and relax. The hand-painted visuals are beautiful and the idle gameplay makes for a calming and creative experience. It moves at its own pace and serves as a reminder that sometimes simplicity is a selling point.
The world can move at what feels like a breakneck speed at times, specially nowadays, where your entire life is crammed into a smartphone, with social media notifications, email alerts, reminders, alarms, and a bunch of other pings that never really allow you to switch off. In fact, switching off can seem like an entirely unattainable prospect. But cozy gardening sim Pocket Oasis wants to earnestly try and help with that.
The premise is simple. You grow plants, you water them, you feed them nutrients, and you harvest their fruit to make jam – which then acts as currency for you to buy things to decorate your space. That’s it, that’s the game. It isn’t a huge RPG game, nor is it one of the best adventure games, but it’s not trying to be. It lives up to its name because it acts as an oasis of calm in a grueling desert of commuting, meetings, or day-long shifts at work where you barely get to sit down.
You just need to open up Pocket Oasis once a day, collect your harvest, look after your plants, and take a couple of minutes to relax. It might seem woefully lacking, but it’s not the type of game that needs to be filled with battle arenas or big bosses to beat. Once you peel away the expectation that comes with modern gaming, Pocket Oasis thrives in its simplicity.
One of its biggest selling points is the quirky, hand-painted art style, and everything you see in the game is created by a real person with watercolors. From the plants themselves, to the balcony, the furniture, and the gorgeous Zurich skyline – a loving nod of the hat to the city that developer knit’n’purl calls home – the unique visuals are planted firmly in reality.
Even with how basic the gameplay premise is, there’s plenty to do in Pocket Oasis, which gives you the freedom to spend as little or as long as you like on your balcony. There are over 30 different plants to cultivate, ranging from beautiful flowers to bountiful fruit, and it’s your responsibility to make sure they get enough sunlight, are fed and watered, and are protected from bugs and rain.
So even if that cactus you brought in lockdown has seen better days, you can honor its memory by building and maintaining a beautiful garden in Pocket Oasis. Plus, as you flex your green thumb and make as much jam as you can, you’ll be able to decorate your balcony not just with fun furniture, but adorable pets to keep you company such as cats and chameleons.
It’s not just the visuals that make Pocket Oasis such a joy, either. The audio, from the beautiful soundtrack to the satisfying pluck of fruit, and the soft clicks as you scroll through your gallery of plants, all serve to keep the peace. No sirens, no war cries, no rattle of machine gun fire from the last battle royale game you played. Everything about it is serene, slow, and so incredibly satisfying.
The only disappointment – and it’s a very slight disappointment, barely even a gripe – is that there’s no way to manipulate the passage of time. One of the best things about Pocket Oasis is creating your own space to relax, but in order to do that, you need to grow one plant, harvest its fruit, convert it to jam, to then unlock the next plant, which then unlocks a cosmetic, and then you need to go back and make more jam to unlock the next, and so on. There’s no way to get your hands on everything all at once, so you’re forced to dedicate the time to growing your garden.
In a world that moves so fast, you’ve likely come to expect everything to be immediately available. And it’s not, in Pocket Oasis. But then, perhaps that’s the point. It almost forces you to kick back and relax, and trust that good things come to those who wait. It’s an exercise in patience, and a reminder to enjoy the journey as much as the destination, and it’s an ethos that everyone could probably benefit from now and then.
Pocket Oasis is available now on iOS, as well as Steam, and if you’re just looking for a way to empty your brain for a little while, or you just want a reminder that life can, in fact, be calm for once, then this is a great little game to pick up. If you’re after even more serenity, check out our picks for the best cozy games and the best easy games, and if you want to do a little more than grow plants, head back to Pelican Town and brush up on your knowledge of all the Stardew Valley characters.