If you need a game to destress this holiday season we suggest Cloud Gardens

As we enter this stretch of the year, a season when sanity and a quick little escape are hard to come by, I’m going to recommend you pre-emptively pick up Cloud Gardens. It is the lowest pressure game I’ve ever played to unwind, but with a few slight challenges and little cues for your dopamine-starved brain that keep you playing.

Gameplay is very straightforward, and is explained very well by the tutorials sprinkled through the Overworld stages, which might as well be called puzzle mode. You are given a small scene and an assortment of plants and objects. The plants all grow in different ways — grass spreads laterally across a surface, trees stay in one spot but grow up and a little out, wisteria likes to climb and spread downward from ledges, but won’t spread across the ground. You need to place the plants so they can grow optimally, and you make them grow by setting down mostly garbage, like crates, old shoes, maybe a forgotten teddy bear. As your plants grow they’ll bloom and fruit, and when you pick it, you can use its energy to buy more and different plants. You’ll want to place your plants and other elements so that you can cover your scene in plants well enough to move on to the next round.

The vibe is very liminal and lonely, but also somewhat hopeful as you make new life bloom from the cracks in the pavement. It’s the coziest post-apocalypse I’ve ever seen. You control how the scene looks by your placement of the objects and choices of the plants, especially once you start playing in Creative mode, and each placement has small audio cues to really make it satisfying. I definitely recommend playing through a good chunk of Overworld first. It does hold your hand on the mechanics, but they’re simple enough to figure out. The real reason I recommend it is because that’s also how you unlock additional plants and scenes for Creative. It’s also possible to just play in small bursts and pick right back up where you left off, making this a perfect game if you just need a second to freakin breathe, you know?

The developer has announced their next game is Garbage Country, which has a similar aesthetic but very different gameplay. It should be available in mid-2026, and I’ll be first in line, even if it isn’t a small stress relieving oasis in the middle of the holiday season.

Godspeed, y’all.

Cloud Gardens is available for PC and Mac on itch.io or Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox.