Review: Strange Horticulture

Overview: 5.0/5.0

• Developer: Bad Viking

• Genre: Puzzles

• Release Date: January 21, 2022

• Platform: Nintendo Switch, PC

• Price: $14.99

Strange Horticulture is a puzzle game where you play as the owner of a plant shop. Each day, new customers enter the store to purchase various flowers and fungi. Sometimes they’ll know exactly what they need, other times they may only have a description of the plant’s appearance or characteristics. None of the plants are labeled, however, so you’ll have to use the customers’ descriptions, a microscope, and Wilfrid Voynich’s Strange Book of Plant’s to identify everything as you go. (But be careful - any mistakes will contribute to a meter measuring your “rising dread.”) You can even customize labels in three different colors to keep your shelves organized with whatever system you see fit.

The cozy plant shop windows reveal a delightfully dreary day, with steady rain beating against the windows. Your trusty cat companion Hellborne dozes by the bell, ready for pets when you have a spare moment. The soundtrack is lovely and calming. As the player, you get to set the pace and decide how to spend your time, when to admit the next customer, when to end the day. It’s a wonderfully peaceful life as the owner of this strange little shop.

As you correctly identify plants for each customer, you’ll collect additional plants and pages for your trusty tome. You’ll also receive letters and other clues as to where you can find more plants, if you can be tempted away from the shop. As you serve customers and water plants, a gauge for the “will to explore” will slowly fill. Once filled, you have the ability to travel outside of the shop by picking a spot on a map. You’ll then receive a text description of what you do or do not find in that location. Occasionally, you’ll also need to use certain plants to overcome obstacles in these mini text adventures. 

As you fill and organize your shelves, you’ll learn about the increasingly strange occurrences in and around the town. You’ll also revel in the intoxicating power to influence people’s lives with your decisions. These decisions will range from helping or aggravating the rash of an annoying customer to choosing sides between a coven and a cult in their supernatural endeavors. Some of these choices will be explicit - you can give a customer Plant A or Plant B. Other decisions you might not even realize you’re making - you can solve a side quest or leave a note forgotten in a pile of papers on your desk until it’s too late. Ultimately these decisions will result in one of eight different endings, including a status for each of the main characters - alive, dead, in hiding, etc.

You’ll be staring at your desk and shelves for the majority of the game, but you’ll be glad to do it. The quiet of the shop interior is filled with the subtle movement of the plants, your cat, and the rain outside the window. The usage of handwritten letters and sketches is a perfect choice to complement the tone of Strange Horticulture. It’s addicting to lose yourself in finding, identifying, and organizing plants. Honestly, I would have played and loved the game even without the mystery plot, but the investigation was an equally fun experience. The only thing better than finishing the main story was the fact that afterwards, the player is returned to the plant shop to finish identifying any remaining plants. True to the pacing of the rest of the game, I got to decide when I was done organizing my plants and ready to close the shop. This was extraordinarily impactful in providing a sense of closure.

Summary

In short, this game is perfect. If you enjoy puzzles, organizing, and mysteries, this game was essentially made just for you. The art and sound design was beautifully and meticulously executed to complement the story and the mechanics. While the mechanics are simple, they were also very thoughtfully implemented. For example, there is a zoom function so the player can read small text without disrupting the game’s interface, which is particularly helpful if playing on the Nintendo Switch in handheld mode. From start to finish, everything about Strange Horticulture is wonderful.