Room Escape Artist

Strange Horticulture is a point-and-click game available on Steam developed by Bad Viking and published by Iceberg Interactive.

Format

Style of Play:

• point-and-click

Who is it For?

• Story seekers
• Any experience level

Required Equipment: computer with internet connection

Recommended Team Size: 1

Play Time: expect around 6 hours, more for the bonus content

Price: $15.99

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

This is a point-and-plant (click) adventure game, with a healthy dose of visual novel.

You are the horticulturist, owner of a local plant store Strange Horticulture. As a cast of colorful customers come by your shop, you are quickly thrust into an occult mystery stretching back hundreds of years. Find and identify the powers of flora to unravel a mystery in the greater Undermere region.

The game has a standard videogame interface where you click and drag items to interact with them. Atmospheric audio and simple animations accompany story segments presented as text.

Scott Olson’s Reaction

Strange Horticulture checks all my boxes for a puzzle-driven adventure: an engaging storyline, choices that impact the outcome, and a blend of progressively challenging logic, observation, and navigation puzzles. The interface, although at times difficult to read, is well designed allowing easy organization of materials and tracking of conversations with the citizens of Undermere and its environs. Unique applications of established puzzle types meshed well with the theme, making players like myself that hate gardening now surprisingly interested in all things flora. Allowing more agency for players to impact character interactions would have further enhanced the already strong gameplay. I will never look at a botanical garden the same way again.

Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction

Taking over a plant store in the strange town of Undermere, you not only need to discover the powerful characteristics of the items you sell but you also get dragged into the occult gossip of your customers.

At its best, Strange Horticulture sets up a relaxing yet fascinating atmosphere to puzzle in. The deduction-based riddles were well-balanced in difficulty and avoided ambiguity. The game threw you right into it, but discovering the shop and its tools was fun and felt intuitive.

At its worst, I found the narrative ending to be disappointing. Lengthy suspenseful character interactions accumulated in an unsatisfying decision. The bonus content tipped the interesting gameplay into feeling like homework. Although I never found myself bored, looking back at the experience it lacked a bit in puzzle variety.

From the premise of the story to piecing together what’s going on to helping people by identifying plants, I overall mostly truly enjoyed the hours of gameplay provided.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

• ? If identifying and organizing plants based on appearance and description does not sound like fun, this game is probably not for you
• + You get to pet a cat
• + Pacing is deliberate, and it is easy to play in short segments
• + Pleasant graphics and atmospheric audio
• + Plant identification is only moderately challenging, which is good because there’s a penalty for getting it wrong
• + After a penalty, the game can continue, with no backtracking necessary
• + A complete story unfolds as you play, with several possible endings based on decisions you make
• ? The majority of the game feels like it is on rails, with few decision points in the first half, which may not be to everyone’s taste
• +/- After the end of the story, you can identify any remaining plants, but there are no real rewards for doing so
• +/- There are hidden items to discover, adding to the variety, but in some cases the interface makes that harder than it should be
• + Light puzzling at several points, which adds variety

Ryan Brady’s Reaction

Strange Horticulture is wonderfully atmospheric. The sound and art set a dark and eerie tone but the game refreshingly avoids being visually graphic. The puzzles woven around the plants and places near the town of Undermere were pleasant to solve, with a low-to-medium degree of difficulty. The writing and graphic design are also of high quality, and I found myself consistently eager to play one more day.

I was frustrated by the lack quality of life features around plant management and their book, as well as the hint system which only applies to the critical path despite the juicier puzzles being optional.

Overall, Strange Horticulture is a solid story-based puzzler which doesn’t overstay its welcome and I would recommend it to most players interested in a dark tale.