Developer: Flying Robot Studios
Publisher: Flying Robot Studios
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Two Leaves and a bud – Tea Garden Simulator – Preview
Simulation games are often a type of ‘hate it or love it’ product. Even if you are into such games, they can either be overly complicated or not challenging enough. Finding the right balance is often a hard process that requires a lot of feedback. Reason enough for us to look at Two Leaves and a bud – Tea Garden Simulator. A game that’s currently in Early Access on Steam.
In Two Leaves and a bud, you are running your own tea factory. On an idyllic location, under the “guidance” of your boss, you get to cultivate and process tea of all sorts. At least, that’s the concept. The reality while playing is much less romantic. Your boss is a bit of a dick, just demanding stuff without really guiding you. The tutorials are, despite being clear, terribly short and offer little help aside from the real basics. This is a hint of how much the game has to offer in the first place, as everything quickly turns into repetitive patterns without a proper story present.
While the surroundings of your possible cultivatable lands are dreamy, the animations feel cheap and disappointing. To be fair, this entire game feels like something that could have been pushed out during an (extended) creative game jam. The workers that pluck tea for you or operate machines are pretty much workers seen from a capitalist perspective. All your workers are people without a soul, all looking the same, slaving on a field day after day. The fact that the animations are minimalistic also adds up to this notion.
The sound is currently lacking terribly. The only music present is a cheap royalty-free-like loop that repeats itself over and over since the beginning of the game menu, not really making it appealing to listen to the soothing piano that should apparently portray the harvesting of plants. Sound effects are simply not present aside from some button affirmation sounds.
On top of these things, we discovered one game-breaking bug, some flawed mechanics, and overall unsatisfying gameplay in the state the game currently finds itself in. For a simulator game, the gameplay is really meek. Now, this could work out in a game’s favor, for sure. Just look at the many players addicted to easy gameplay in the many games published on platforms such as Facebook. Two Leaves and a bud even has some overlapping points with these games, such as waiting for the tea to grow or get processed. That being said, the game in the current state is just not any fun. You get the “recipes” for three varieties of tea, and the fourth you need to figure out yourself without any direction.
There are some small things that extend the gameplay, such as eventually expanding to more land, and more processing machines to get higher quality tea. Some of these processing techniques are to dry, roast, grind, and more. To that extend, Two Leaves and a bud also has some great educational capacities, but those are also not being utilized yet as the game simply lacks content. It lacks content in the story, background information, useful help, in-depth gameplay, and polish in the graphical and sound departments. All these reasons are why Two Leaves and a bud is, in its current state, definitely not recommendable.
Conclusion
While a simulator like this has the capacity to become something of an educational product or a valid simulation game, right now in the Early Access state, it’s definitely neither of those things. Two Leaves and a bud has a long way to go before it becomes something to be enjoyed by either casual players or sim-game lovers. We did love the concept, but even as far as Early Access titles go, there are far more polished products available.
Two Leaves and a bud - Tea Garden Simulator - Preview,
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