Reviews

• 

  🆆🅸🅻🅳 🅲🅷🅸🅻🅳

  Jan 15, 2022

  [h1]Addictive little thing[/h1] Simple with certain innocence added to it, this is a pretty cute and minimalistic clicker/idler that doesn't make things unnecessarily complicated The art style is simple and on point as the color pallette feels oddly satisfying enough, and the mechanics are really easy to learn. It would've been better if you could completely remove some recipes from the crafting menu instead of de-prioritizing them or selling their needed herbs/plants/trees. There's not much to be said about this little game, it's what it is, nothing more, nothing less, and if you are newer to this genre of games, i think this would be a good start. If you get it on a sale (although, it's cheap as it is), you will be able to get some hours of fun out of it, and on the bonus side, as you click for thousands of times you will develop conscience and wonder what the hell you're doing with your life, or about the mysteries of the universe. [spoiler]this is a cry for help. please send someone. i am stuck inside this game, i want to escape and live my life[/spoiler]
• 

  Atarun

  Aug 6, 2016

  [h1]Description[/h1] At first glance, Voodoo Garden is a re-skin of Plantera, an idle game where you grow a garden indefinitely (or until you get all the achievements). However, in its curent state, [b]Voodoo Garden is NOT an idle game[/b]. It is certainly a clicker, but since the game does not progress at all when it is shut down, I think it does not fit the definition of idle games. Indeed, all other idle games I know, except for some weird browser experiments, will welcome you back with a message saying how much you earned while you were away and this does not (and does not award you anything). Like Plantera, you own a garden with a variety of plant types and animals. The garden grows slowly before your eyes and you can either let your minions harvest slowly or speed them up by clicking. Unlike Plantera, you start with no minion ([spoiler]you have to feed animals then sacrifice them to get a spirit minion[/spoiler]), there is no way to automatically defend your crops (at least at lower levels) and you will earn money not by selling your harvest directly but by using them in voodoo recipes. All in all, the one difference that will probably matter the most when comparing this game to Plantera is that prices never go down... In Plantera, whenever you buy something, its price rises, but when you sell it back, the price goes back down. This encourages experimentation: you can upgrade your plants and animals, knowing that you will be able to re-buy the lower level things later on. Here, the prices only go up, which makes the idea of selling anything kind of insane (except for getting the achievement). It seems the creator is considering removing this "feature" (imo, a bug) in a future update, but as it stands right now, Voodoo Garden will punish rather than reward experimentation. Which seems silly in a game where everything (recipes and spirit effects, not just the plants and animals) is revealed progressively, so you simply cannot plan in advance and MUST experiment, even though it is actively discouraged by the game design. [h1]Pros[/h1] [list] [*]Gorgeous 2D graphics [*]Great diversity of mechanics and interactions [*]Original theme (and the cutest voodoo stuff ever) [/list] [h1]Cons[/h1] [list] [*]Broken game design (prices should go down when you sell a plant or free a spirit, otherwise there is no point) [*]No progress while away [*]No stats of any kind (have fun counting everything) [*]No way to tell how many slots there are for anything before trying to place one (so you don't know whether you're working up to buy something you could actually use or not, especially annoying with animals [spoiler]since they take a good while before sacrifice and then you discover there is no available slot[/spoiler]) [*]When exactly does this game save?? [*]Minions are practically useless at lower levels, meaning the game is much more of a clickfest than Plantera or even Cookie Clicker and Clicker Heroes... [/list] [h1]Verdict[/h1] Voodoo Garden has awesome graphics and a good concept but it is riddled with baffling game design issues... Those could be fixed rather easily. IMO, for this game to be worth anyone's time, the dev needs to do 7 things: [olist] [*]Calculate prices based on currently owned items, not previously owned ones [*]Award some money while away, based on current game state (like actual idle games) [*]Buff up the minions and give you one at the start so that waiting will be an alternative to clicking like a maniac (as in actual idle games) [*]Put stats in the game [*]Somehow highlight the difference between items you can buy but cannot place (because there are no available slots) and those you can buy and place [*]Create a button to show all available slots or at least show the number of slots used / total number of slots for each category of item [*]Create some way to automatically ward off bats (or make it accessible at lower levels, in case there is such a way I haven't unlocked yet) [/olist] Until all 7 things are done, I cannot recommend this game, no matter how pretty it is (and it really is). [url=http://steamcommunity.com/id/atarun/recommended/421040/]Try Plantera instead.[/url]
• 

  MEVENho

  Aug 8, 2016

  [h1] it has an oddly satisfying soundtrack, that I can't buy as a DLC.[/h1]
• 

  Ananoriel

  Aug 10, 2016

  An adorable clicker game where you have to care for your own swamp garden. The gameplay is pretty simple. You need to gather fruits, leaves, flowers and critters in order to make potions to sell. You can feed animals, sacrifice them if they are big enough, so they can help you as a spirit. So long you level up, you unlock more stuff to make potions. It worked out very relaxing for me, and it kept me busy for a while. I love the look of the game. The style of everything and the colour palette are super cute and comfy to look at. The soundtrack reminded me somehow of Age of Empires, with those drum sound effects. Perhaps I would have liked a more extensive tutorial at the beginning because not all things were clear to me. Besides that I don't have any negative points. I would recommend this game for people who like to play a simple relaxing game for not too much money. My rating for this game: 7/10.
• 

  foursmols

  Aug 14, 2016

  A good, wholesome, relaxing family friendly game in which you overfeed your pets, then mercilessly murder them so their spirits can help you with harvesting your garden and you won't have to do as much work. Good stuff, two thumbs up.
• 

  Zara Cat

  Aug 17, 2016

  I love Voodoo Garden, at first I wasn't sure if I should buy consider most of the reviews stated it wasn't really an idle game. I'm not sure what game they're playing: but this is definitly an idle game. I go afk, I come back, I spend my money, collect some special snail shells and dragonfly wings and leave. Refresh. Sure, there is no spirits to kill enemies, thus not getting me frog legs and such. But that's just an incentive to click a little bit: and don't all clickers make us click just a little? The only negative thing, is if you let it run all night and come back: the entire game will be laagy and requires a refresh. But that's just a small annoyance. Adorable! Worth the few coins it cost <3
• 

  lokipagan

  Dec 7, 2016

  Okay, I've only played for a little over half an hour and I can already tell you what you need to know about this game. Clicking. So much clicking. Pros: - Good graphics. Nothing ground-breaking, but it flows very nicely and is very aesthetically pleasing. - Pretty straight-forward. Nothing super-complicated. - Kinda fun. - Good sound quality and background music. - Interesting concept and idea. - Like some Facebook games without the annoying real-time harvests and constant begging for money. Cons: - No tutorial. Which would have been nice for a few things. There are a couple directions, but nothing explaining how things work in-depth. - Somewhat shallow. - Clicking. Oh god, the clicking. You have a garden. Every 10/15/20 seconds, whatever each particular plant is, they produce a fruit/flower/mushroom etc. You click to harvest. You harvest the right combo, you make a potion. Potion is sold. Use the money to buy more plants. Now, remember: Each plant has 2-5 fruits. You. Are. Constantly. Clicking. Grass, flowers, trees, animals, grass, flowers, trees, animals, ad nauseum. Click so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants and click more so you can buy more plants... Do you see the problem? On and on and on. And there's no clear explanation on how the production priority works, so I think I'm utitlizing the most profitable prioritization, but who knows? It's a chill little game, but it doesn't take long to see exactly where this circle is going...
• 

  Xintract

  Dec 25, 2016

  This game is great. You grow an herb garden, force feed animals until they die, and then use thier ghosts to help harvest plants. It looks nice and it's pretty fun, for the price it is worth it.
• 

  Player Auction

  Jan 8, 2017

  [h1]Voodoo Garden is a stylized casual clicker game where you grow a garden, harvest plants and reagents from the critters who scuttle by, and make potions from them. It has a rather interesting take on the helper system and enough unlockable plants and upgrades to keep you occupied for a good while. [/h1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6XCrTrIjGk .Gameplay. *Click, click, click* Typical of the clicker genre, the majority of Voodoo Garden is played via clicking with your mouse. You can also use WASD or the directional keys to pan the camera, but you can use your mouse for that if you simply move it to the edge of the screen. You’ll gather ingredients yourself by clicking. If your inventory fills up, don’t worry! Every ingredient over your ingredient threshold adds one gold coin to your coffers. Ingredients can be gathered from most every creature that scurries through your garden—except for bats. These crafty little buggers will swoop down and fly away with ingredients unless you click them to shoo them away. Crocodiles and Skulls will occasionally float in the river along the bottom of the screen. There will be an audio cue—a watery sound—every time one surfaces and clicking on it will reward you with an amount of gold that increases every time you click a new one. You can access the plants available to you by pressing the coin icon in the top right corner. Select your greenery and plant it by clicking one of the green circles in your garden. There are three categories of plant: herb, shrub, and tree. Each can only be planted in their corresponding row (herbs in the front most row, shrubs in the middle, and trees in the furthest row). You can also purchase upgrades for your plants once their planted by clicking the window beneath the plant in the store. Each upgrade increases the rate at which the plant grows. The store also offers animals, totems, and upgrades for your utilities. I’ll break them down below. Animals: Each animal eats a specific plant that grows in your garden. Once it’s fat enough, you can sacrifice it to create a spirit that will help you harvest plants. They also cause the plants they ate while alive to flourish. Spirits can only be placed in specific spots between columns formed by herb, shrub, and tree and will only harvest from the columns closest to them. Like plants, these can be upgraded to work more efficiently. Totems: Totems attract specific critters to your garden in greater number. These are invaluable for the faster creatures like lizards, which will stop and stare at the totem, allowing you to click them and gather their tails. They can also be upgraded to increase their effectiveness. Utilities: These include upgrades to what your spirits can pick up and how many ingredients you can carry. They’re quite costly, but well worth the investment. Spirits will gather ingredients for you as long as it’s not raining. When it is raining, your spirits disappear and additional critters won’t dart about amongst your plants. Creatures that are already in your garden before the weather changes will remain. There’s a quiet ambiance when it rains, which is nice. Ingredients are used to produce potions, which are sold for gold and net you experience. You can set priority for what is created by assigning numbers to each recipe via the menu accessed by clicking your level in the top left corner. The little hut at the center of your garden will continue to churn out potions as long as you have enough ingredients. Your level increases once you have enough experience and increasing it gives you a greater variety of plants, animals, upgrades, and potion recipes. .Atmosphere. The music in Voodoo Garden is serene and peaceful. It features a lot of wind instruments and a drum, which fit nicely into the theme. The music continues on an infinite loop, but it’s so charming that you don’t even notice. The graphics are bright and cutesy, stylized in such a way that they look hand-painted. .Longevity. I've been achievement hunting, so I'm already 12 hours in. I forsee another couple of hours before I get all of them. For those who aren't as dedicated to getting achievements, longevity depends highly on your willingness to keep on clicking. .Pros. [list] [*] Quick and easy to pick up. [*] Appealing graphical style. [*] Crafting potions adds a layer of strategic thinking when choosing plants. [*] A peaceful, relaxing way to pass the time. [/list] .Cons. [list] [*] Gameplay is too simple for lengthy play sessions. [*] It’s too easy to click on something you don’t mean to. While collecting fruits and the like, I often found myself accidentally selecting one of my spirits or shifting a totem. [*] The game does not continue on its own for a while after you leave like others in the genre do. [*] No reason to play after you finish unlocking everything. [/list] .Bottom Line. Voodoo Garden is an inexpensive and relaxing way to pass the time. If you’re a completionist, you’ll be able to collect the achievements simply by playing the game. If you enjoy casual clicker games like Plantera, you’ll be right at home here. Either way, the game will definitely be something you’ll turn to when you’re tired of slaying and struggling to survive in the other titles in your library. [code]If this review helped you, please give it a thumbs-up. For more reviews like this one follow the [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/gamingwithNtK/curation]NeedtoKnow Gaming Curator[/url] page <3[/code]
• 

  (💕) Pink Lily

  Mar 31, 2017

  The game was worth the $$ and time investment. I recommend the game for casual gamers, 100% achievement hunters and people who are just looking for a fun clicker game. It was really difficult for me to drop so I played it nonstop until I completed it. I loved the music, graphics and how simple the game eventually becomes. You can leave the game idle and depending on the build would require some clicking and effort. You are building a Voodoo Garden and the items you need in order to craft items must be "farmed" Some of the required items are critters that you must click on like lizards that spawn. You can increase the rate by applying upgrades that become available as you level up. If you have played or heard of the game PLANTERA it is similar.
• 

  RipWitch

  Jun 9, 2017

  [b]Did that bat take a beehive?!?[/b] Ready to tend to your lush farmland? Welcome to the swamp your hut sits on as it is ripe to grow plants to harvest. But, you don't exactly sell what you harvest. Armed with a few recipes, the various critter parts, fruits, leaves, and so on can be combined to make various voodoo items to sell. Armed with only a few plants, you work up your way up to getting more access to different plants and recipes with each level up. Three lanes are available to plant, the top for trees, middle for bushes, and the bottom for herbs. The beginning plants cost a decent amount but the more advanced ones will cost a lot, with the upgrades increasing the price. But these do contain ingredients for products that sell for higher price than what you start out with. As you get more and more plants you can plant, you will eventually lose space in front of your hut so it will be time to expand. Of course the price will increase with every expansion, but more space equals more cash. I do recommend putting ghosts on the expansions, as you will need to scroll to the side at this point, but I do believe bats only bother plants on your current screen. Various animals will walk through your garden as they can also provide some ingredients. Of course, more variety will pass through as you level up as even lizards and dragonflies will eventually visit. But be careful of the bats! They will have no mercy to steal from yur garden! I believe the bats will link up to your spirits, as they will not take the mushrooms and bogroots until the spirits can. These will most likely be the ingredients you will be short of the most, including the beehives bees will leave behind. Luckily, there are ways to get more to spawn in forms of totems. Each totem having their own design to correspond to what they will attract when lit. Sadly these come way too apart. Snakes will be one of the earliest animals you need a lot of, but the totem for them don't become available till to 20s levels. An inventory is available, with limitations set. You have a set amount of each you can take in, with an upgrade increasing it, and once you try to harvest past it, those will be sold for one coin. Giving you a hint that you shouldn't buy anymore of those plants if you keep with having more than you can carry. But hey, you will not be the only one that can harvest. You can buy animals, starting with a rabbit before you unlock more by leveling up, that you can fatten up by feeding them their prefered food. But if this is going to take resources away from you, why do it? Permitting that you have available spots, you will get a prompt to sacrifice the animal once it is fully fattened up to turn them into a spirit. Forever slaved to your garden as they have to pick the various plants for you. This excludes the mushrooms and bogroots until you get the upgrade. If you place them by the plants they ate, they will also get a boost in growth speed. With the upgrades going to their plucking speeds. So later game brings you to only needing to scare off bats and picking animal parts once the spirits come in to help. What else can there be? It will occasionally rain, making spirits disappear and animals stop coming around. Even the totems will be put out due to the rain, nullifying their affects. Making you pluck everything yourself on a moment's notice to spice it up a bit. Before you know it, the rain will stop and everything will come back. Voodoo Garden leaves you to your own devices without a tutorial or what anything does. I do wish it gave some indication of the different aspects, especially when your plants (and those who will be planted there) can diminish in production. It only took a while that bees planted a beehive there and noticed that bees are your savior, where previously I kinda freaked out thinking it would forever block the space as there were no recipes calling for beehives at that time. Now this is not an idle game. While it does have idle aspects, Voodoo Garden is very much a clicker game and will only continue collecting and growing if it is running. With spirits helping out, you only need to click the bats and the animals walking by the plants, and even than there are recipes that do only require plant items. [h1]Overall[/h1] + Great visuals + Music + Simple - Can get old, as there is no motivations other than to continue For a game that I bought just because I liked Viridi, it really grew on me. It really is a great game to just zone out for a while and look at their colorful visuals and hear the music. If you're an achievement hunter, they will be easy to get by just playing through once. I hope you make a prosperous garden.
• 

  kristen

  Jun 15, 2017

  When I first got this game I really enjoyed it. It has good music, it's cute, and I liked having my own little garden and spirits to help around. After a few hours, I felt done with the game, but I couldn't really leave it with achievements unfinished. It took me 33 hours to finally get all of them. While this game has some good points, I don't find them good enough to really recommend this game to others. The good aspects are as I said, good music, cute game, as well as what I suppose is generally a decent concept. It's a good game for achievment hunters because if you're dedicated, you could finish them all in less time than what I took considering I wasn't paying attention 100% of the time. It helps that your spirits can help pick things like mushrooms up, so the 6666 mushrooms achievement isn't as intimidating as it seems. You can also play this game while not completely paying attention to it, allowing this game to be a good side thing if say you're doing something else or waiting for another thing to finish, you can just do some clicking around on this game in the meantime without worrying about saving progress or anything of the sort. The not so good parts of this game include all of the clicking (one of the achievements including clicking 2000 dragonflies). A chunk of the ingredients needed to make certain recipes in order to get coins requires you to click the creatures that run/fly/etc across your screen. The coins are of importance, as they allow you to buy more plants, expand your garden, etc. which all help you level up in the long run. I also found that this game became a little tedious after a few hours and I didn't really want to continue it. I sort of reluctantly did finish it (on the side of doing other things, as I don't believe this game is one that you could just sit and completely focus your attention on without getting bored) for the part of me that needed this game to be completed before given up on. Lastly, the biggest down side to this game is that I feel like it doesn't have that much replay value. Other games you can playthrough again for different experiences or to try different styles of play, etc. With this game though, I feel like once you play through it once, if you play through again it's just the same old thing. Honestly, I don't believe that this game is worth what it costs. I've played better games for much cheaper. I'm glad I got to experience it, but if I were given another opportunity to purchase a game like this for the price that it's at, I wouldn't do it again.
• 

  Keiroki

  Jul 3, 2017

  Fun and relaxing, I'd describe it as a mix between a clicker and a nice interactive screensaver (however theres a lot more game than other "screensaver" games such as Mountain) beware that if you want those achievements, you better be prepared to do a lot of clicking (there are items that increase the amount of things such as snakes and general wildlife, but nothing that aids you in clicking them, at least that I've found yet)
• 

  Arbutus

  Jul 10, 2017

  Pros -very nice graphics style -no battles, no bosses, not extremely difficult and intense -music is good -achievements are reasonably easy to get -about 15-25 hours of gameplay to max out everything/get all achievements -interesting concept -trading cards Cons -not a whole lot to the game -must harvest/kill a lot of animals
• 

  Rusty Shackleford

  Jul 30, 2017

  Achievements: All possible. Several are quite tedious. Many cannot be achieved by idling and require quite a bit of attentive clicking. Pros/Cons: + Cute art + Nice music/sound effects + Upgrade system/unlockables + Decent time killer + It's cheap - There's not much in terms of a tutorial. While there was some tool tips every so often, it would've been nice to have been given a little more info on what to do in the beginning. - Gold/XP can only be earned while the game is running. - Unlike many clickers, not every process can be automated. The player must remain active to collect many of the game's ingredients. - Gets quite boring after awhile-- while new plants/upgrades are gradually added, none of them really add anything interesting. Overall: It's hard to say quite how I feel about Voodoo Garden. While I was charmed by its aesthetics, the whole experience was ultimately lackluster. To me, the best part of a clicker(especially a more creative clicker like this) is getting more and more efficient to the point where all processes are automatic except for overall management. I found Voodoo Garden disappointing in the fact that the user's job never really gets much easier. From the beginning to the end, the player is madly clicking the screen to collect ingredients that their helpers cannot collect. It gets to be a tedious process. Ultimately, unless you're a huge fan of mindless clickers, I'd pass this game up.
• 

  Narayan

  Feb 12, 2018

  Voodoo Garden is a cute idle/clicker game, with pleasant music, manageable amount of content (not one of those endless ones), and cool theme. You occupy a swamp, collect ingredients, make potions, sacrifice animals for their spirits to serve you, that sort of thing ;) I ran it in the background for few days, with probably not even 4 hours of me paying attention to it. Unfortunately it might have had a memory leak or something, cause after several hours it always slowed down significantly and required a restart. I don't see myself “playing” other idle games in future, but this one was nice. [i]Written after completing the game with 33.6 hours run time & 100% achievements earned.[/i]
• 

  Juggernaut

  Jan 13, 2019

  + Awesome concept - love the art and sound - Total lack of gameplay depth. At the late stages, you don't even need to click to keep things going - Lack of any explanations of what things do. What does a bat do? What does a snake do? - Janky UI. Hovering over items in the shop is supposed to trigger an explanation about what the item is, but most of the time it doesn't work - Unbalanced item crafting. Virtually all items require an ingredient that you can't actually plant and harvest, so you are continuously at the RNG's mercy to generate frogs or bees - No way to pause the game. Worse, it keeps running when you are in the shop or crafting UI I'm actually really sad to leave a negative review - this could be such an awesome game, but it needs more polish and work.
• 

  the Traveler-flying w/o laptop

  Aug 17, 2019

  Bought this on sale as an idle game to run while working and doing other stuff, and though I'm less into the gardening aspect I thought the swamp-voodoo theme was pretty cool. The artwork style was enjoyable throughout. I did not keep the music playing but from what I heard of it, it seemed to fit the game. My played time is about what you can expect as far as time needed to get all the Steam achievements for Voodoo Garden. You could potentially play the game until infinity and unlock/level all the pieces to your garden but that was not something I was personally interested in. I did notice a performance issue with this game, which is ultimately why I chose a thumbs down for this review. After a few hours running idle on my average Win10/i7/Nvidia laptop, there was a noticeable slowing down of the game. As in, my gardening ghosts and the wandering wildlife started moving and collecting in slow-mo. Restarting the game fixed the problem temporarily, but this slow down was fairly consistent. This is NOT a 100% idle game if you're looking to collect all the achievements. Several of the achievements require active clicking, sometimes hundreds of times, and a couple call for clicks of random spawns that you simply have to wait for. If you decide to pick this up, [spoiler]I'd advise you to pretty much ignore the bats. Eventually they won't really matter at all. If you're having some issue collecting skulls, know that they only appear when it rains and make a splashing sound.[/spoiler]
• 

  Kiric / Emlin

  Sep 2, 2020

  Hundreds of thousands of pixel creatures were senselessly murdered, sacrificed to become enslaved ghost or brutally hit on the head so that they would stop stealing from my garden during the achievement gaining process of this game! And that is the dark core of what Voodoo Garden is! For a casual clicker game with no real purpose, Voodoo Garden isn’t that bad; it provides you with what you’d expect. Hours of pointless mouse mashing and a sore hand/wrist combo! (Seriously though, it is important to take care of your wrists while playing any game, especially ones with repetitive motions. Do ensure you take breaks and do some hand stretching exercises to minimise damage!) Very simple but time-consuming achievements are the only thing that kept me going really. Was it fun? I mean... it was alright. It was pretty to look at but overall, I’d describe it as “addictive” but only until I had 100% the game. After that I felt no reason need to play anymore. Job done – time to move on! I’d have preferred to give this game a neutral rating but since Steam still doesn’t have those I’ll just say, it’s cheap and often on sale for 50% off. It gives you a few hours to time wasting and if clickers are your thing, sure – why not? I’m sure trading cards and the points store would appeal to some too. Oh, I should also mention there is no manual save system - you wont see a save menu of any kind but the game does save when you close it and will load from where you left off!
• 

  S.T.A.R.S Leon S. K.

  Aug 19, 2021

  +++ 100 % Steam Achievements but it takes 10 or more Hours ++ 6 Trading Cards (5 would be perfect) but still super/ very good -- very Grinding Game / no Help Functions/ Special Abilities, only the slow Animals Good for Achievement Hunters & Trading Card Collectors