Lily's Garden

About

Lily's Garden is a casual mobile video game developed by Tactile Games. The game is marketed as a relaxing life simulator in which the main character, Lily, takes care of her great aunt's garden. Gameplay consists of decorating the garden, solving puzzles and interacting with different characters. The game attracted attention on Twitter in August of 2019 after an advertisement showing Lily getting abandoned by her boyfriend after she tells him she's pregnant went viral.

History

Lily's Garden released on the Apple App Store on February 4th, 2019.^[1] Two days later, a Let's Play of the game started on the Crazy Games YouTube channel (shown below). The game has received a rating of 4.9 on the Apple store from 30,000 users.

Online Presence

Lily's Garden has 396,000 likes on Facebook^[2] and has stated that it has been downloaded over 5 million times.^[3] The game was praised on the blog Sparklebliss,^[4] with author Carly A. Kocurek saying it "demonstrates how much room there is for creativity, exploration, and storytelling in games that are too often easily dismissed."

Pregnancy Ad

On August 7th, Twitter user @messytweet tweeted an ad for the game, which shows Lily finding out she's pregnant, telling her boyfriend, and the boyfriend driving away on a moped (shown below). The ad is a dramatization of the game's backstory, in which Lily is getting over a recent heartbreak. @messytweet wrote "WHAT IS THIS FUCKING AD I FOUND ON FACEBOOK," gaining over 74,000 retweets and 275,000 likes. The video has been viewed over 9.9 million times. It was also tweeted by @NEGROMERMAID^[5] and gained over 84,000 retweets and 306,000 likes. Twitter users found the dramatic shift in tone in the short ad humorous, with many commenting on the unexpected cut to the boyfriend riding on his scooter and the unknown connection between the ad and the game's content.

Search Interest

External References