Remarkably, Grow: Song of the Evertree isn't the first game to put the trappings of city-building games in RPG-tinged adventures - we can point to Dark Cloud and ActRaiser as predecessors. But Grow is doing it with notable style and charm, and the early buzz suggests that this is one indie game well worth checking out.
Grow gives you the humble task of crafting entire worlds, using alchemy to plant new locations through World Seeds. Those seeds grow into various types of environments - deserts, arctic realms, et cetera - and you then build villages and help the citizens there find happiness. In between all that, you dive into caves and ruins, solving puzzles in more traditional, but combat-free, exploration segments.
Early critic reviews have been quite positive (81 on OpenCritic), and Steam players have been similarly kind, as the game has a 'very positive' rating on Valve's platform. Developer Prideful Sloth previously released Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles back in 2017, a similarly chill take on open-ended adventure games.