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I usually don’t buy hidden objects games because of their lack of replay value to me, but I really love this one.

The presentation is lovely. The story is that you inherited of your grandfather’s house, and you’re in charge of restoring its garden, and eventually to take part in a garderner’s club contest. You will be visiting all of the house’s rooms (15 in all) to sell the items hidden within them.

The game can be played timed or untimed. There are 3 different types of hints you can use: standard (and you’ll get bonus money if you don’t use those), as well as camera and thermometer hints that are hidden within the rooms (cameras show a flash of where the objects are located, while thermometers change your cursor from cold to hot as you move it across the scene).

You can serve up to 5 customers at once, for a total of 20 customers (objects) to find per room. The customers’ faces appear on the left of the screen along with the name of the object they want to buy and how much they’ll pay for it. Once you find the object, a pile of coins is displayed in place of that customer — it’s up to you to click the money to immediately get another customer, or wait until you finish serving one of the other customers. This way, you can control how many customers you’re handling at once — if they have to wait too long (I mean, really too long — and this is independant of whether you selected timed or untimed mode) the amount of money they offer you for the object will slowly decrease.

Sometimes, customers will ask you to find a set of 2, 3 or 4 similar objects (for instances, 3 pairs of gloves). If you manage to click on all items in the set in quick succession, you’ll get a bonus amount of money.

Every so often, you’ll also receive letters from special customers asking you to sell them a set of 20 objects (for instance 20 coffee makers) hidden in a single room. Other times, you’ll have to find a set of 20 objects hidden among several different rooms on top of the 20 standard hidden objects.

Also, on top of the objects you’ll have to search for customers, a certain amount of loose coins are hidden within each scene. Don’t miss them if you want the extra money.

What is really nice is that, not only does the list of objects you have to find changes everytime (that’s the norm for HOGs), but also most of the items within the room (and the coins) will be moved around! So if you found that umbrella next to the chair last time, it might be a different size and in a completely different place next time! This truly add enormous replay value to the game.

Another thing that adds replay value is the beautiful garden. Between each room search, you’ll be brought back to your garden where you can use the money you earned to buy items. For each item, you’ll be able to choose between 3 different styles which you can mix and match anyway you want. You can even change your mind later on (for a small fee) and pick another item or style, so you can potentially continue playing forever as you change your garden around.

I really have nothing bad to say about this game except, maybe, that’ I’d want more of it. It would be great to have even more rooms, or an even bigger garden to customize. I’d definitely pay for an expansion to this game, or a version 2 maybe.

I’ve played GardenScapes on 3 different computers — on XP and Vista 32-bit, and currently playing it on Windows 7 64-bit. Works fine on all 3 operating systems. No problem at all.
Rating: 5 / 5