Cloud Gardens

Cloud Gardens sits between a sandbox toy and a puzzle game with light objectives. The verb is gardening: plant seeds on lo-fi 3D scenes of urban decay, and use foliage to slowly reclaim the abandoned objects scattered through each diorama. The aesthetic blends brutalism and beauty deliberately, and the satisfaction comes from watching plants grow over things that humans built and forgot.

The campaign runs across six chapters of multi-stage scenes, each asking you to balance the natural and the manufactured. Adding objects to a scene encourages lush vegetation to grow on them, but each placed object must be fully covered in foliage before you can proceed. The puzzle layer is gentle — there's no time pressure, no failure state, and every solution looks different from every other player's because the placement freedom is genuine.

A sandbox mode strips out the campaign's objectives entirely. The catalogue of unlockable objects and plant types is enormous, and with no rules to follow, the gameplay is closer to a creative tool than to a puzzle game. Players can download looping videos of their completed dioramas to share them online, and an active Discord community trades creations.

Generative soundscapes by Amos Roddy (composer for Kingdom and Kingdom: Two Crowns) sit underneath the gameplay, adjusting to what's happening in the diorama in front of you. The whole experience is built for unhurried play — the kind of game you put on for half an hour at the end of the day and end up sitting with for two.