Coloured Static Press / Surreal incremental adventure / PC
Grow berries. Feed a giant hole. Try not to fall into your own increasingly questionable gardening project. Berry Bury Berry makes the most innocent pastime feel magnificently wrong.
Gardening games usually offer a comforting bargain. Plant a few things, admire the sunshine, maybe decorate a flowerbed. Berry Bury Berry starts with the growing part and then introduces a large, hungry hole that seems rather too interested in everything around it. Before long, you are collecting berries, throwing them into the ground, chatting with peculiar creatures and wondering whether the smiling sun has anything good planned for you at all.
Developed by Get(Color) Games, this surreal first-person incremental game is built around repetition, upgrades and discovery. Its genius is giving that familiar loop a deeply strange personality. The work itself is simple. The questions surrounding it are anything but.
A hole lot of progression
The basic rhythm is wonderfully straightforward: gather berries, send them down the hole, collect earnings and invest in improvements. As the hole grows, more possibilities open up, and the garden becomes a progressively busier collection of plants, equipment and eccentric inhabitants. It is the sort of system that invites you to finish just one more upgrade before calling it a day.
Berry Buddies provide useful assistance, and upgrades eventually remove some of the more tedious tasks. The automatic money collection upgrade, in particular, was a welcome relief after numerous attempts to gather scattered coins while time was running out. Star orbs offer another layer of progression, with additional abilities rewarding continued exploration.
There is something satisfying about watching a ridiculous garden evolve into a more capable, more chaotic machine. Every time you think the routine has settled, another upgrade, creature or object appears to suggest that you might have missed the garden’s latest terrible idea.
When the sun goes down, the garden bites back
During daylight, Berry Bury Berry is colourful and oddly friendly. The garden is full of gnomes, pots, unusual creatures and delightfully exaggerated details. The enormous hole is an obvious concern, but you can almost persuade yourself that feeding it fruit is a perfectly reasonable way to earn a living.
Night changes the equation. The environment darkens, visibility shrinks to a small illuminated patch and the hole begins moving with a rather alarming sense of purpose. Suddenly, an innocent attempt to collect the last few coins becomes an improvised survival exercise. It is surprisingly tense for a game in which much of your day has been spent harvesting berries.
There is a sensible response: go to bed, bank what you’ve earned and return to work tomorrow. Our reviewer, however, occasionally preferred to examine something interesting, turn the camera and walk directly into the hole. The very hole they had spent hours helping to grow. Multiple times. There is probably a useful safety lesson in there, although the garden clearly isn’t planning to teach it.
Falling in ends the day and costs part of your earnings. Those consequences make the darkness meaningful, but they can also feel punishing when an awkward camera angle is the difference between escaping and becoming a rather unfortunate garden deposit.
A cheerful world with something deeply wrong underneath
The strongest ingredient is the presentation. The bright, almost childlike colours make the garden look approachable, while the strange faces, unsettling sun and increasingly unusual characters suggest that somebody has quietly replaced the rulebook. Its humour comes from this contradiction: everything is absurd, yet the game behaves as though putting berries into a possibly malevolent abyss is an entirely respectable occupation.
There are enough wonderfully peculiar discoveries to keep curiosity alive. Is the pig staring at you? Why does that object have eyes? Is the hole actually getting bigger, or is the entire garden becoming less trustworthy? We found ourselves looking forward to the next strange little surprise as much as the next mechanical upgrade.
A few problems beneath the surface
The camera was the most persistent frustration. When the hazard you are trying to avoid occupies an ever-larger section of the play area, losing track of your footing is especially aggravating. The night-time visibility restriction creates a wonderful atmosphere, but makes it harder to recover from a poor camera position or retrieve money that appears just out of reach.
The core loop can also become repetitive. Collecting berries, filling the hole, earning money and buying upgrades is the game’s essential engine, and not everyone will find the repeated work relaxing or compelling. The upgrades help, and the surreal discoveries provide welcome interruptions, but the repetition is real rather than something to pretend away.
Fortunately, Berry Bury Berry has enough personality to offset many of those rough edges. Even when the day ended badly, we often wanted another attempt, either to improve our route or simply to see what else was lurking in this thoroughly untrustworthy garden.
If you have spent the afternoon making an enormous hole bigger, perhaps turning your back on it after dark is not your finest gardening strategy.
Something worth digging into
The combination of silly incremental progression and creeping unease works remarkably well. It is not conventional horror, and it is certainly not a quiet gardening simulator, but it finds a distinctive place between the two. The camera occasionally conspires against you, and the underlying routine will not appeal to everyone. Yet discovering the next oddball character or upgrade remained a real pleasure.
Final verdict: 84/100
Berry Bury Berry is wonderfully strange, moreish and far creepier than its colourful garden has any right to be. The shifting atmosphere, curious characters and upgrades make feeding the hole oddly addictive. Camera troubles and some repetition keep it from a higher score, but anyone who enjoys offbeat incremental games should have a very good time getting themselves into increasingly deep trouble.
Game details: Developed by Get(Color) Games and published by Get(Color) Games / Black Lantern Collective. Released for PC on 29 January 2026; Nintendo Switch edition followed on 20 August 2026. Reviewed experience described from an original hands-on manuscript. View the official game store page.
Original hands-on observations and 84/100 score supplied to Coloured Static Press; edited and expanded by our editorial desk. In-article images are genuine official game imagery. No generated illustrations are used. Review by the Coloured Static Press team.