Tuin

Tuin is a garden the size of a coffee table. Sokpop Collective, the Dutch outfit that ships a small experimental game every month, released this one in August 2022: plant seeds, pull weeds, sell vegetables, and slowly turn a hand-sized plot into a conveyor-fed automated farm. It costs about as much as a sandwich, takes a couple of pleasant hours, and looks like a wind-up toy someone left running on your desk.

The clever hook is the sales cap: you can only sell a handful of vegetables at a time, so the game is never about hoarding infinite produce. It is about spacing, timing and layout, and it makes even the early minutes feel like a small logistics puzzle rather than a click-off.

What the loop feels like

You plant pumpkins and carrots, and weeds creep in between them. That's Tuin.

You check the pairing chart, put complementary crops next to each other, and the harvest bonuses tick up. That's Tuin.

You buy a plucker, wire it to a generator, and the farm harvests itself while you rearrange the pens for your goats. That's Tuin, and by then you are not playing a clicker so much as curating a very small, very smug machine.

Three shops, one tiny empire

Progression is split across three shops. The Farm Shop unlocks seeds and saplings, up to eight crop types. The Build Shop sells the anti-weed tech that matters most early: wooden planters stop weeds spreading, and water pumps, hoses, rain collectors and ponds handle irrigation. The Tech Shop is the endgame: generators, batteries, cables, conveyor belts, a stacker for output and a plucker for automatic harvesting. Livestock pens round it out, with sheep and goats that need a steady supply of grass and seeds. Land expansion buys room for all of it, and community advice converges on the same two priorities: buy weed control before anything pretty, and automate water and harvest the moment the tech shop unlocks, so the farm runs itself while you work on layout.

There is even a building lock, a small quality-of-life blessing that stops your cursor dragging a vital water pump across the map during a misclick.

Where it stumbles

The word idle on the store page oversells it. Weeds keep spawning and demand active attention, so early on you cannot walk away for long without the garden going feral. Cursor placement is finicky, interactions can feel ambiguous, and the lo-fi aesthetic some players find charming reads as unpolished to others. Reviews are Mostly Positive rather than rapturous for exactly these reasons: it is a neat experiment in Sokpop's monthly-release mould, fun for an evening, easy to finish with, and much more subdued than the genre's deep number-go-up heavyweights.

Playing it today

On Steam for a few dollars, Windows and Mac, and on itch.io from the same developer, whose games are also available through their cheap monthly subscription. Note that the iOS App Store has a gardening app with a near-identical name, but it is by an unrelated developer and is not this game.

The verdict

A charming diorama with a genuine automation arc and a sales cap that forces actual thought, sold at a price where nobody gets hurt. If you want the same second-monitor energy with more depth, Rusty's Retirement is the fuller version of this idea, and Garden Galaxy and Tiny Pasture scratch adjacent itches.