Strange Horticulture

Strange Horticulture is a plant-themed detective game. Playing as a local store owner, you need to find mysterious plants, identify them, and figure out which ones would best serve your clients’ needs. The game features accessible puzzles, immaculate soothing vibes, and a surprisingly high-stakes story.

Strange Horticulture takes place in a small shop, where you tend your plants, receive colorful customers, and read through various documents. Among these documents is a large foldout map, which acts as a simplified interface for exploring the surrounding lands and finding new specimens. Later on, you also acquire a looking glass that can be used to reveal hidden details in letters and notes.

The main puzzle aspect of the game consists in identifying the plants and deciding which one should be used for the situation at hand. You have a field guide, but some specimens are lacking a picture, so they must be deduced from their written descriptions and by process of elimination. The field guide also specifies the uses of each plant, which you must match to the ailments and requests of your customers. For the most part, the identifications are fairly straightforward, especially when the field guide contains a picture. As such, Strange Horticulture constitutes a good introduction to the deduction puzzle genre.

The map is divided into a grid which you can freely explore, but it's quite large. Unless you select a city or another landmark, random exploration will rarely pan out. Most of your finds will come from documents dropping hints about particular spots where something interesting might be found. There are no graphics to these locations; what happens is narrated with evocative prose.

What really makes Strange Horticulture memorable is its plot and atmosphere. While at first it seems like a cozy game filling mundane orders for ordinary people, it soon becomes clear that the villagers' stories intertwine into a horror-tinged tale with apocalyptic stakes. At several points, there are different plants which may properly further the scene, and your choices impact the outcome of the plot. The moody atmospheric music and the earthy green-and-brown palette add to the mounting sense of unease, but the horror elements all take place offscreen, keeping the end result suitable for all ages.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz and edited by Oriane Tury.