The natural evolution course for any given genre of gaming is for it to start off within a bigger dev team, get popular, and become a dime a dozen within all spectrums of the gaming industry. The final path of said genre is for it to become a staple within the ultracheap shovelware indie scene as well. We are going to take a look at a prime example of such today, the hilariously awfully named God Damn the Garden, an intriguing but irritating low budget “boomer shooter” trying to look and feel like a game from the Nintendo 64 era… only much worse.

At its core, this is a retro-styled first-person shooter, where you have to carefully manage your ammo and health in a dungeon full of traps and monsters to kill. A dungeon that oddly resembles what you would expect from Ocarina of Time‘s… pre-pre-pre-pre alpha build. Murky, confusing, basically everything you’d expect from the development team figuring out what they can do with an engine’s design mechanics, but plastered inside a complete project, being sold for hard-earned cash. Every character in the game, be them the NPCs or enemies, are also low-poly, with excessively stretched textural work, just like characters from the N64 era. In that regard, God Damn the Garden won me over. At least for a while.

For as much as I appreciate its slight retro themes, God Damn the Garden is the classic example of a game trying to be comedic without the knowledge on how to be funny. It might be cute to have a little bunny, a little capybara, or a duckling in your game, but to have them literally say “LOL” and “LOLZ” every five seconds isn’t funny. It’s cringy, and it’s also a fantastic way to hinder your game from standing the test of time in the near future. Nothing about God Damn the Garden is funny or even worth a chuckle. Sadly, neither are its shooting mechanics, which just plain suck.

The gun at your disposal is horrendously weak, requiring a ton of bullets to kill any given enemy. You can, however, charge it up in order to do a bullet barrage sort of attack, which is useful against slower, bulkier enemies. The problem doesn’t lie that much on the gun at your disposal being bad, but actually the fact that your aiming is clunky (you have a bizarre auto-aim mechanic that more often than not diverts your shots towards a wall) and your defenses are next to nonexistent. Any stupid enemy attack can take from 25 to 50% of your health in a mere second, with health pickups being scarce and uneffective. Sure, checkpoints are everywhere, and you can respawn until you get bored (which isn’t saying much), but that doesn’t make the game less annoying.

Even though it’s a really short game, God Damn the Garden will test your patience, and not in a fun way. It fails as a challenging first-person shooter, it fails as a comedic game (using LOLZ in your dialogue doesn’t make you funny), and it fails, to a lesser degree, as a retro homage to the Nintendo 64 era. There is a good chance you have never heard of it prior to this review, and sadly, I think it’s best if you keep unaware of it. It’s no offensively bad, but I cannot think of a single redeeming factor. Not even the inclusion of capybaras… for the “LOLZ”.

Graphics: 3.5 God Damn the Garden looks like a Nintendo 64 game, which is charming at first. It is completely devoid of a sensible art direction, however, making it look like a random assortment of assets rather than a cohesive game.	Gameplay: 4.5 Although it runs well, its controls and physics are pretty bad, considering its simple “retro-FPS” premise. Its difficulty curve is also nonsensical.
Sound: 4.0 Monotonous (and short) music clips and some cheap sound effects plastered throughout the game. You will be playing it on mute.	Fun Factor: 4.0 It’s just not fun to play. It has a somewhat intriguing concept, but its frustrating difficulty, lack of polish, and terrible humor turn it into an exercise in patience, not a fun indie romp.
Final Verdict: 4.0

God Damn the Garden is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Xbox Series S.

A copy of God Damn the Garden was provided by the publisher.