Greenhearth Necromancer is a semi-idle witchy gardening sim. You play as a young necromancer who has inherited their greenwitch grandmother’s co-op apartment unit, as well as her renowned balcony garden — but you don’t have any idea how to care for a garden! Luckily, as a necromancer, you can revivify the dead plants into unlife and use your magic to help care for them.
The primary gameplay of Greenhearth Necromancer consists of taking care of your plants. Each plant has particular light and humidity needs, meaning different species will thrive in different parts of your balcony. Each plant also needs regular water and fertilizer — but try not to give them too much! You’ll have to brew new fertilizer using ingredients you harvest from your various plants, and you can learn lots of different fertilizer recipes that provide different bonuses.
You’ll also have to learn and brew pesticides and fungicides to protect your plants from nasty contagions. Or, if you’re a student of Blighted Necromancy, you might even want to cultivate those pests to power your spells!
Because that’s right, you’re also a necromantic witch, and that means you have much more than mundane water and fertilizer to keep your plants thriving. You can learn up to 51 different spells across 5 schools of necromancy that you can cast on your undead plants. Each spell has a different effect, and many can combine in powerful ways. You can experiment freely through trial and error, or read the descriptions of spells and plants in your Spellbook and Codex to get a sense of what might work best! Of course, these spells also cost ingredients or your Social Battery to cast, so watch your resources.
Finally, fertilizers and pesticides aren’t the only things you can brew: there’s a whole recipe book full of potions to learn and use, each creating long-lasting and powerful effects that work on living and undead plants alike.
If you keep your plants happy, they’ll level up over time, giving you more ingredients to spend and improving their hit points and resilience. You can prune your levelled-up plants to reap the rewards.
Occasionally, happy undead plants will bloom ghostly flowers; you can either pluck those to use as ingredients or wait until the spirit bees show up, harvesting the blooms to give you mystical honey. (And once a day, you can take that honey to the local Community Market, where you can trade it for Community Favour, and acquire new ingredients, recipes, plants, and decorations!)
Meanwhile, living plants can even grow bigger if you can keep them alive long enough! As you progress further in the game, you’ll unlock more of the secrets of life and death... But don’t be afraid to compost your unneeded plants as well — getting new plants is pretty easy, so you can keep refreshing your garden, and there are certain ingredients you can only get by composting your plant babies. As a necromancer, it’s important to preside over the whole cycle of death and rebirth.
Greenhearth Necromancer is not just an idle clicker game. There’s lots of depth to explore in the various mechanics of the plants, potions, spells, and more, so don’t be afraid to dive in and start experimenting. While there’s lots of rich gameplay to explore as you tend to your plants’ needs and learn all the ways that magic can help your garden thrive, your plants will ultimately take time to grow. Greenhearth Necromancer is designed to be a game that you can step away from.
After you’ve tended your garden and things are looking good, leave the game running in the background while you go about your day for a little while. Check back in after 30 or 60 minutes (or whenever you’re ready) to top up your plants’ water and fertilizer, throw around a few spells, and then step away once more. Over time, your plants will continue to grow, bloom, and level up, while your brews and rituals complete in the background.
And don’t worry if you accidentally step away for too long: even if you neglect your plants and they wither or die, you can always make a comeback. You’re a necromancer, after all. Just revivify them once more, stack up some potions and spells, and you’ll be growing again in no time. There’s no failure state in Greenhearth Necromancer: the game is there for you, however you want to play it. If you want to garden while you read a book, do your taxes, or even play another video game, go for it!
While your garden grows, four different vibey radio stations can accompany your workday, plus you can customize a noise machine to dial in the perfect background sounds and change the time of day to suit your preferences. Do you like a nighttime vista while you listen to the sounds of a thunderstorm behind a soft ambient soundtrack? Or a sunset golden hour to the sounds of a forest and a driving drum’n’bass backdrop to keep you motivated?
All of this gardening gameplay is contextualized by an ongoing narrative. As time passes, “event cards” will be drawn into your hand at random from a deck; each one represents a short narrative event exploring your character’s arrival at and growing comfort with their new home and the various characters that inhabit the Greenhearth Co-op with them.
As time passes and you get to know your neighbours, you’ll make your way through a deep narrative about the nature of magic, your character’s grief, and the relationship with their late grandmother. Each character brings their own perspective on magic, relationships, grief, queerness, and living in a world that brings both struggles and joy.
But don’t be in a rush: relationships take time. Sometimes you’ll need some time to pass before the story will move on, or you’ll need to get to know your neighbours more before they’ll open up to you. Play the narrative event cards at your own pace, and know that even if you focus on them, it’ll take a few weeks of gameplay to uncover the whole story. There’s a lot of both gameplay and narrative to enjoy here.
As you advance through the game, make your balcony your own through some light cosmetics. You can unlock new styles of plant pots and other balcony decorations at the Community Market, and there are over 50 different species of plant you can find, each with their own living and undead looks. And even though each plant has specific needs that might restrict where they’ll most thrive on the balcony, your most powerful magic and potions can change even that, so you can move your favourite plants front and center.
Do you want to create a beautiful vista of colourful plants in classic pots, or a skeletal plant army with the darkest decorations you can find? Is your aesthetic the alien and strange, with tentacles and bulbous things and eyes staring at you, or is it childlike and playful (and just a little creepy)? What you choose to keep and nurture is up to you!
Delve in and Explore
There’s so much to explore in Greenhearth Necromancer beyond the surface — and if you’ve already played our demo, so much more to unlock and discover across weeks of gameplay.
Keep an eye out for the various Rituals available in your codex, which will upgrade your ability to brew things, improve your plants’ stats, and uncover more and more information you can use to perfect your garden. There are also in-game tutorials you can access from your Codex that explain all the nitty-gritty of gameplay.
But most of all, enjoy the vibes. Thanks for playing!