The Miller's Garden, by Damon L. Wakes
This game about tending to a garden is fairly short, very simple, and extremely repetitive. It features some lovely poly art and a pleasant ambient soundtrack, but after a few rounds of clicking through rote tasks that I felt I had no reason to care about in the first place, even those felt like scant rewards for my efforts.
But while I did not find the gameplay at all fun, this is also beside the point. The gameplay is presumably not meant to be enjoyed per se. Instead, it’s the means to an end, a necessary step in conveying the actual message of The Miller’s Garden.
More spoilery musings for the initiated:
The piece seems to be mostly a meditation on the transience of human endeavors and the cyclical nature of things, a theme which The Miller’s Garden aptly symbolizes by evoking the motif of a spinning waterwheel. No matter how many times you tend to the various things around the garden one day, you’ll find that nature has effaced your handiwork by the next day, and so on and so forth, until the garden ceases to exist. It reads like a clever, minimalist Ozymandias: a piece of interactive poetry in which the meaning becomes apparent not through the words on the screen, but through the process by which the player interacts with them.
First paragraph aside, if one gets far enough to appreciate what’s really going on, I feel that this is a very fine game. It is well worth its short playing time.