Leafy Corner Review — Little Shop of Regular Plants

Imagine running your own small plant-selling business. A shop where all of the products are succulents, flowers, and potted houseplants, lovingly grown and cared for in-house until being taken home by a customer. Your day-to-day routine is watering plants, choosing what decor to set up or which pots to house your supply in, and maybe occasionally helping a customer take home the right plant for their home. Your income is entirely dependent on your green thumb, your knowledge of and care for the plants you have in stock, and how many you keep growing on the shelves.

What I have just described is Leafy Corner, a cozy little game about running and caring for your own little for-profit plant nursery.

Occasionally in my reviews, I run into an issue where I struggle to meet my word count because there are simply some games that there isn’t a lot to say about. Leafy Corner is one of those games, and it isn’t because the game itself is bad, but because it’s the sort of title that wears all that it is on its sleeve.

This is a game in which you run and decorate a small plant shop. That really is all that needs to be said about it, as the gameplay loop is remarkably simple: You place furniture within your shop, place down pots, fill them with plants, and then water and watch them grow until they attract a customer to come in and buy them. As you go about this gameplay loop, you’re given a series of objectives that allow you to unlock more plants, more decorations, or more furniture, expanding the possibilities of what your shop can be. Eventually, you unlock the ability to grow specific plants per order, and customers will occasionally ask you to assign them plants based on their needs, which is a little puzzle that you can occasionally get wrong. If you’re me, you’ll get it wrong often, but that’s beside the point.

And that’s about it. “Cozy” and “relaxed” are important adjectives used to describe Leafy Corner, which lacks economic simulation beyond the bare bones that I just described to you. There is no rent to be paid, no employees to hire, no price-setting, advertising, or meaningful customer-attraction mechanics. The most time-consuming part of the game is keeping all your plants watered while you wait for a customer to come in and buy one.

The game has ample decorations to unlock, and you can really personalize your business. The loop of unlocking new plants is fun and easy, but overall the gameplay loop lacks any meaningful challenge or complexity. If I had to make a comparison off the top of my head, I would say that Leafy Corner plays a lot like a mobile game: You get on to play a very specific gameplay loop, with very easy, consistent progression, and decorate your little shop as you do.

I will say, however, that for $10, the game feels like it leaves something to be desired. The core gameplay loop, lacking in complexity as it is, quickly and easily becomes repetitive. All goals the game has to strive toward are either unlocked early or start to offer less meaningful rewards, such as new gameplay unlocks, around tier three (of six). The core mechanics the player actually engages with, such as watering plants and restocking, start to feel tedious, which is a problem the game could easily avoid with automation mechanics, such as hiring employees. It can’t automate these processes, though, because then there would be nothing left to do and the game would become even more boring than it already is.

The biggest element justifying Leafy Corner‘s price is the art. Again, there is a lot of decor to unlock, and putting that much effort into giving the player stuff to decorate with is admirable, as is the sheer variety of plants you can unlock. However, the game’s simple gameplay loop doesn’t, in my opinion, feel like enough to justify the end goal, which is simply to keep unlocking new decor and plants to fill your shop with. Getting new plants is cool, but the process of caring for them is generally the same, as is their selling price, so it doesn’t feel like the game is adapting around your progression.

To be clear, I don’t think Leafy Corner is a bad game. For some, I imagine it is exactly the kind of game you’d want to relax and kill half an hour to an hour on a weekend, before a shift. However, I can’t imagine the bare-bones nature of what the game has to offer being worth a whole lot more than that: a quick and simple escape while you wait for something better to do. For some, that’s all they need in a game, and for that audience I highly recommend the title. However, it is hard to say Leafy Corner couldn’t do more, and for the game’s asking price, I felt more like I was trying out an Early Access demo than a full title.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Leafy Corner. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Leafy Corner is available on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.