Plant puzzles
Bring long-forgotten plants back to life in Botany Manor.
If you owned a huge manor house in the English countryside, what would you do? If you’re Arabella Greene, the scientist in the new game Botany Manor, you’d turn it into your laboratory for discovering ancient plants and bringing them back to life.
Released for Nintendo’s Switch, Microsoft’s Xbox and PC on 9 April, the game has you playing as Arabella. She’s a botanist – an expert in studying plants scientifically – living in the 19th century. Your job is to help her go about her work.
The game is about exploring and solving puzzles. You walk around your mansion finding new rooms and items. Those include seeds, which you’ll need to plant in pots and find the best habitat and conditions to make them grow. You do that by finding clues around the house in posters, newspapers, letters, paintings and postcards, which will teach you what each plant needs to come back to life.
The game isn’t just about plant science though. As you explore, you’ll also find out about Arabella’s life as a scientist – in a time when lots of big scientific discoveries were happening but when women, who wanted to be part of that, faced lots of challenges.
Botany Manor has been designed to be relaxing to play, letting you explore the house and its gardens as fast or slow as you like. Solving the puzzles is also calming. It’s about picking up items and turning them around in your hands, and looking for clues that tell you (for example) what soil temperatures are best for different flowers, or how to use a“flash lamp” to create a pretend thunderstorm to help plants grow.
Botany Manor also has chilled-out background music, making it a great game to relax with in your spare time. You might become a keen amateur botanist yourself, shortly after you start playing.