A Relaxing Plant Shop Sim That Prioritises Comfort Over Challenge
Leafy Corner is a cozy, plant shop management sim that promises the excitement of growing, selling and caring for a range of real-life houseplants while building a warm, inviting shop filled with greenery and charm.
We’ve played enough farming sims to know the story off by heart – choose crops, plant them, water them, sell them, repeat. So, as we launched Leafy Corner for the first time, one question immediately came to mind: will it offer anything different, or is it the same old story?
Building Your Dream Plant Shop
The first obvious difference is that you’re not a farmer – you’re the owner of a charming little plant shop. You start at level one with a small shop and a limited selection of small plants, pots and furniture. The game starts with a short tutorial that takes you through the basics of choosing some furniture to display your plants on and then choosing and placing pots, which come in a variety of colours and decorations. You then choose which plants to grow in your pots and watch as they grow.
Pretty soon, customers will enter, take a look round and choose a plant to purchase. As you sell plants you progress through the levels, unlocking the ability to expand your shop, grow different types and sizes of plants, and choose from new furniture and decorations.
And here’s another difference. I don’t know about you, but when we play farming sims we’re never that fussed about the different crops or watching them grow. We don’t exactly go gaga for garlic or are passionate about parsnips. However, give us a collection of houseplants – especially the tropical ones with huge, glossy leaves – and we can’t wait to get planting. Is that normal? Just asking for a friend…
The point is, if you’re the sort of person IRL who can’t resist bringing home “just one more” houseplant, even though your living room already resembles a tropical rainforest, then there’s a good chance Leafy Corner will be right up your street.
Unlocking New Plants Keeps You Coming Back
At the start of the game, your selection of pots, plants and furniture is fairly limited. However, as you play, the number of plants you grow, customers you serve and money you earn all contribute towards completing a steady stream of objectives. As these totals increase, you earn points that can be spent on unlocking new plants, pots, furniture and decorations, allowing you to personalise your shop.
Plants go through a life cycle of juvenile, developing and mature, and the older the plant is, the more money it will sell for. Likewise, the larger the plant grows before reaching maturity, the more valuable it becomes, although medium and large plants are only unlocked as you progress. Some plant types also have variegated versions to unlock, which appear by chance and fetch a higher price.
There is also the option to mark plants that you do not wish to sell, whether you’re waiting for them to mature to increase their value or you’ve grown them to fulfil an order and don’t want another customer snapping them up.
Sometimes customers enter your shop with a request and it’s up to you to find them a suitable plant from your stock, or grow the perfect one while they wait – and wait they will. We had customers waiting days for us to fulfil their request or even simply to pay for their purchases. There is no time pressure to serve customers and there seems to be no consequence for making them wait. On one hand this adds to the cozy nature of the game, but on the other it feels highly unrealistic. There is, however, time pressure in other ways.
Cozy Gameplay Comes At The Cost Of Meaningful Management
Enter the endless watering. Every single pot has to be watered by hand. Thankfully, it isn’t especially time-consuming to tap RB, enter ‘watering mode’ and click on each pot until the water level rises (not too much, or your plant will rot), but as the days tick by your plants become drier and drier. Ignore them for too long and they’ll die, leaving you no choice but to throw them away. The constant watering mechanic seems to rear its ugly head in every gardening or farming sim. Do sim gamers actually enjoy spending their time watering plants when there are other, more interesting things they could be doing? We can only assume so, because it appears time and time again, and Leafy Corner is no exception.
There is also never any worries that you won’t sell any plants – customers always find a plant they want to purchase. This means that if you refrain from restocking the shop for a while then your plants will eventually run out. This does mean that you will spend a lot of the game restocking your shop, which can get a bit tedious after a while because there is just no thought needed – it’s the same process on repeat – choose a pot, choose a plant, plant the seed, wait, water, sell the plant. However, we can see the flip side to this as this is what many people want from a cozy game – no thinking required. Your mindless tasks are accompanied by unobtrusive music, the occasional gasp of excitement from customers and the gentle tinkling of water as you care for your plants. That repetition is very much part of the game’s brain-numbing appeal.
The controls are equally straightforward, allowing you to rotate the camera and zoom in and out. We did find that once our shop had expanded and was packed to the brim with plants, it became surprisingly difficult to pinpoint the exact plant that needed watering using its little water-drop icon.
Leafy Corner Misses Opportunities For Deeper Strategy
As you progress, orders become a thing. You’ll occasionally get a phone call from a customer requesting a number of plants that fulfil certain criteria, such as being pet friendly or suitable for low light. The game tells you whether you already have the required plants in stock and, if so, which ones they are. If not, you can simply grow some. Again, there appears to be no time limit on orders, so our advice is to wait until the plants have matured before selling them to maximise your profits.
You can view all of your plants in a catalogue, which shows their common and scientific names, alongside useful information such as how much they sell for, whether they’re pet friendly, and how often they need watering. New plants can also be unlocked here using points, and you can browse the different variegated versions you’ve managed to grow. The catalogue also includes all of the pots and furniture available to unlock.
Plants also vary in their difficulty to grow, ranging from beginner-friendly varieties that only need the occasional watering to more demanding plants that require specific light levels or higher humidity. However, this information is only useful to you when fulfilling customer requests. Every plant you grow in your own shop follows exactly the same care routine, with no real challenge beyond remembering to give them a drink from time to time.
This was a big point of difference to other similar games we’ve played, such as the Two Point games. We would have liked to see a bit of challenge, like having to grow high humidity plants next to a mister, or thinking about the light levels in different places in the shop when considering where to place plants.
Decorating Your Shop Is Fun, Even If The Options Feel Limited
That said, if you’re looking for a management sim, Leafy Corner probably isn’t the game for you. It is refreshingly upfront about what it is – and what it isn’t. It doesn’t promise intricate management systems, advanced plant care or a dramatic storyline. Instead, its aim is simply to provide a cozy shop sim that you can enjoy without pressure or unnecessary stress. And in that respect, it succeeds.
A big part of the appeal of games like this is decorating your space. Leafy Corner gives you a choice of wallpaper and flooring, but unfortunately, you can’t decorate different sections of the shop independently. We’d have loved to create a dedicated corner for all the pretty flowering plants, complete with matching walls and flooring, but that simply isn’t possible. There is a wide selection of furniture, all of which can be recoloured, along with wall art and other accoutrements such as watering cans and candles (which can’t be sold), but overall the customisation still feels fairly limited.
The sheer number of plants you can grow soon becomes overwhelming – well over 100 by the end of the game. Your shop isn’t particularly large, even after unlocking both expansions, and while it’s sensible to keep a few of each type in stock, that’s simply not achievable. So how do you decide which plants to focus on? We’d have loved to see a simple sales insight that showed which plants were proving most popular, or highlighted customer trends, allowing you to make informed decisions about what to grow and sell.
A Relaxing Plant Shop Sim That’s Easy To Get Lost In
Despite its simplicity, Leafy Corner remains engaging and addictive as you work towards unlocking new plants, decorating your shop and creating a place of plant perfection. If you’re already a houseplant fan, you’ll enjoy discovering new varieties, growing your collection and nurturing your plants.
But even if you’ve never managed to keep a plant alive, Leafy Corner might just persuade you to try again.
Important Links
Leafy Corner – Put Down Roots In A Cozy Plant Shop Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/leafy-corner-put-down-roots-in-a-cozy-plant-shop-adventure/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/leafy-corner/9P8T7V0ZVQPC/0010
