Games Like Marginalia: A Desktop Garden

Your desktop is the terrain

Marginalia is a transparent, always-on-top idle game that lives on one monitor of your choosing. It reads where your windows are and grows a garden in the space around them: on window top edges, in the gaps, on floating islands of soil. A small crew of astronaut-suited animals tends enormous alien plants, hauls the harvest back to a landed ship, and turns it into money over time. You are their foreman. You set policy, buy upgrades, and watch. Rearrange your windows and the terrain changes shape. Plants fade gracefully to new homes. Nothing breaks, nothing dies, and no one is ever in danger.

How it plays

What it is not

There is no danger and no failure state. There is no offline progress: the only currency is time the game is actually on your screen, and closing it means nothing accrues. It never steals focus, never opens a window over your work, and never interrupts. It throttles itself on battery and while a fullscreen application covers the screen. It is meant to be left running beside your real work for hours, and to be pleasant company the whole time.

Privacy

Marginalia needs to know where your windows are. A small bundled helper reads the on-screen rectangles of visible windows, their front-to-back order, and your monitor layout. It never reads window titles, window contents, keystrokes, or files. The game never goes online: it makes no network connections of any kind.