About the Game
About Plague Garden
What It Is
Plague Garden is a dark comedy crafting sim set in a swamp that probably shouldn’t be inhabited, let alone farmed. You tend a hex-tiled garden of ingredients that range from “mildly inadvisable” to “banned by three separate kingdoms.” You harvest them, carry them to your cauldron, and brew potions that technically work — just not always in the ways your customers were hoping.
The heart of the game is the consequence reports. Every potion you sell generates a ripple through the village — sometimes helpful, sometimes catastrophic, always documented by the Bureau of Unintended Botanical Outcomes with the weary precision of civil servants who have seen too much. The reports are the payoff. They’re where the tone lives.
If you’ve played Potion Craft and wished the consequences mattered more, or played Stardew Valley and wished the crops were more unsettling, or read Terry Pratchett and wished someone would make a game that felt like that — this is the game we’re building. It sits somewhere between Graveyard Keeper’s cheerful morbidity and the deadpan bureaucracy of a municipal planning office run by people who’ve given up.
How It Plays
A typical session: you wake up in your swamp hut, check the morning mail (one order for a sleeping draught, one passive-aggressive note from Alderman Grubb), then head out to the garden. You water the moonpetals, harvest the fermented bogwater, and notice that the Weeping Nightshade has started growing sideways again. You carry your ingredients to the cauldron, follow a recipe — or improvise and accept the consequences — then package the results and send them to the village. The next morning, a consequence report arrives. The sleeping draught worked, but the customer now dreams exclusively in iambic pentameter. Alderman Grubb is not pleased. You have three days to brew a countermeasure or face reassignment to the Compost Heap. And so the cycle turns.
What It Isn’t
There are no gacha mechanics, no energy timers, no battle passes, and no dark patterns. The humour is Terry Pratchett, not Saw — nobody gets hurt in ways that aren’t funny, and the violence is limited to what a goat might do when distressed by involuntary poetry.
The business model is straightforward: you buy the game. After launch, we plan seasonal content packs — new plants, new recipes, new consequence chains — and cosmetic items for your garden and hut. That’s it. No subscriptions, no premium currency, no mechanism designed to make you feel bad for not spending more.
Who’s Making It
Plague Garden is being built by a solo developer with a small budget, a large collection of gardening metaphors, and a firm belief that games should respect the player’s time and wallet. The scope is deliberately contained: two dozen plants, a deep recipe system, and hundreds of consequence reports that make the world feel alive and slightly unhinged.
Platforms & Timing
PC first, via Steam. Mobile (iOS and Android) and web after the PC version is stable and the consequence reports have been properly field-tested on real humans. As for timing — it ships when it’s ready. A premature launch is worse than a delayed one, and the swamp is patient.
Follow Along
Press inquiries: press@plaguegarden.com
Dispatches from the swamp, occasionally: