STRANGE HORTICULTURE

DEVELOPER Bad Viking PRICE $21.50 AVAILABILITY Released WEBSITE https://www.iceberg-games.com/strange-horticulture/

I’ve been trying not to get burned out by work this year. As soon as my last student has been educated for the day, I play games. Thanks to Strange Horticulture, however, I’ve now taken on an additional role, moonlighting as an Olde English horticulturalist, curing maladies, investigating poisonings, identifying and watering plants, then tramping across the countryside to find what people want. It’s a bit like the Papers, Please of plant games, right down to writing names and observations on labels. I don’t want to poison anyone, myself. By accident, anyway.

The game takes place in a dark, but cosy, shop, over several days. Ring the bell to summon customers, listen to their story, then find what they need on your increasingly disorderly shelves. How do you know what they need? Open the drawer to find letters, labels and items, including a hefty reference book. If you need Dranthium, look for long, sharp leaves. Trimblehuff’s flowers mostly point down. And so on. Making mistakes leads to a “rising dread” and, soon enough, your fragmented mind needs to be reassembled via various (slightly punitive) puzzles.

Finding new plants and pages for your book occurs as customers, colleagues, and mysterious strangers get in touch with leads, usually in the form of cryptic clues. The plantfinding business is competitive, I guess. A friend of a friend found mushrooms in a cave to the East of Arnside so, if you can find this location on the map, you’ll travel there (which is told as a story via text). As I recently discovered in Bilkins’ Folly, treasure hunting can be very engaging and suitably rewarding. In this case the reward is always plants, but it’s still good.

I think the game is wonderful, and I played it to the bitter end, but I would mention a few criticisms. Decision making is certainly fun, like whether to intensify or cure a person’s disturbing dreams, but I also wanted to be able to turn people away, or treat them ineffectually. This would complicate the game’s logic significantly, but you’re often forced back to linearity when any given puzzle remains unsolved for too long. This happens all the time in the adventure genre but, because agency underpins so much of Strange Horticulture, linear chokepoints feel dissonant.

There’s also an incremental hint system, which I love, but it struggles to articulate the puzzles that rely on observation. Luckily, all of the art is thoughtful and beautiful, so you’ll spend a lot of time staring at it. The puzzles also don’t get much harder, over time, which is perhaps why this experience feels like a job. Yes, a person will (later) tell you they have stomach pains rather than the name of the specific mushroom they need for stomach pains, but you’re still just finding a mushroom. Of course, like any great “detective game”, it is possible to miss content entirely.

Ultimately, Strange Horticulture will punish you for (only) doing your job, if you fail to notice the larger political landscape and how to manipulate it. I joined a cult, then didn’t have the nous to carry out their dirty work, so certain avenues were locked. I’d suggest allying with everyone, and not making any rash decisions, or causing any nasty rashes. The ending states are complex, clever, and combine good and evil, while relying on competent horticulturing. After all that, I definitely need a holiday and the sweet smell of a Worryless flower.