Gnome Alone

In The Magic Garden (re-released as Gnome Alone), the player takes the role of the gnome Grobble whose attempt at a robbery failed. His sentence: garden work. Only after reaching a certain amount of effectiveness, the next level can be tackled.

In its core, this is a time management game. There are various tasks to take care of like watering plants, mowing the lawn, repairing broken parts of the garden or catching another gnome which messes up the garden. Some of those tasks appear randomly and other are a direct result of the weather and temperature. However, all require the use of tools which can be fetched at certain buildings, but taking too many of them causes Grobble to be overworked. His exhaustion is shown with another bar, basically a time limit, which can be lowered by eating certain plants or finding special items at more far off parts of the garden like the tunnel system. The garden, which is the main part of the game, is shown from a top-down perspective.