Mandrake Girls Garden of Secret review: weirdly addictive

Let me just put this out there up front: I am not the target demographic for Mandrake Girls – Garden of Secret. In fact, the pitch email we got about covering the Korean indie mobile game specifically said:

They are doing something really different with it by creating an anime game that isn’t as sexualized as the stuff currently on the market and they are targeting anime fans and young women with it.

I am not an anime fan at all, and I’m certainly not a young woman. I am, however, interested in indie games, and Mandrake Girls – Garden of Secret is part of an interesting non-profit program from Korea’s government that’s working to promote Korean indie games outside of the country. The game’s developer, Owlogue, just released the English-language game this April on iOS, so I decided to take it for a spin.

(See: Did you know that the South Korean government actively supports its indies?)

That strange addiction

Mandrake Girls – Garden of Secret is a really simple game. It’s basically a simpler version of Farmville with mandrakes: you can upgrade your various flower pots to grow different mandrakes, and then you click them when they’re ready to be harvested (they’re on cool downs of between 1 and 15 minutes for the most part). Harvesting a mandrake gets you gold, which you can then use to further upgrade your flower pots or to unlock sections of the game’s story and the anime-style illustrations that go along with them.

It’s a game that’s probably easier to understand just by watching it, so take a peek:

As is probably obvious, this isn’t really a game you’re going to focus on or binge-play. It’s more of a brief aside; something to do absent-mindedly while you’re watching a movie, or something to take a quick break with. Personally, I’ve been doing a lot of mandrake-farming during my workouts (after all, there’s nothing quite as manly as farming for cute mandrakes in between sets of bench pressing).

Like Farmville, it’s the sort of game you can’t really focus on for long without becoming bored because there’s a fair amount of waiting and the player interaction is extremely simple. But also like Farmville, it is weirdly addictive despite being objectively pointless. I have the game open right now. I stopped to farm the latest mandrakes in the middle of typing that previous sentence. I don’t know why.

The reason might be that the few interaction mechanics that are there feel pretty good. There’s something satisfying about tapping and watching the mandrakes pop up with a disinterested-sounding “Hmm” while the gold flows into your bank account. Plus the game looks and sounds quite relaxing; it is certainly a far cry from the harsh, terrifying world of the last game I reviewed.

There are also some social features available in the game—you can send friends watering cans, for example—but I don’t think these really have much impact on the basic experience of the game.