The best game on Playdate.
A genuinely astonishing bit of work.
Part visual novel, part gardening sim. You play as Midori, a university drop out who has opted to start a flower business.
The game unfolds via text messages in semi-real time. You grow and harvest flowers, all with their own timers for seeding, watering, picking, etc, and each time you check back in to the game, snippets of conversation appear in a messaging app on your in-game phone. It's not quite real time, in that messages come through after time has passed as opposed to at set times, but with a little suspension of disbelief it still works great.
Most effective are the way the writing handles events: texts that lead up to an off-screen event, then texts that cover what did or didn't happen at said event after the fact. It's an incredibly immersive way of framing things.
The game deals with Midori's relationships with her partner, friends, and parents alongside her business, and there were moments of real gravity in the way these conversations were handled. The art is great, the writing is superlative, the music is a lovely set of lo-fi beats, and the structure of plant, water, chat, wait, repeat fits the little handheld incredibly well.
A beautiful thing.