> *An occult puzzle game in which you play as the proprietor of a local plant store. Find and identify new plants, pet your cat, speak to a coven, or join a cult. Use your collection of powerful plants to influence the story and unravel Undermere’s dark mysteries.*
*Strange Horticulture* is an occult puzzle game where you play as a shop owner who inherited a mysterious plant shop in an unpleasantly eerie town. From the moment you open your doors, you're helping customers seeking everything from remedies and poisons to mystical plants for rituals.
Your customers will come in with cryptic requests and it is your job to figure out what plant would best suit their needs. Sometimes they only say vague things about what they want, or can only explain what their problem is and how they want it fixed. As such, the primary gameplay loop involves you identifying and cataloguing plants to be able to service each customer by referencing your plant encyclopedia and subtle clues scattered throughout your inherited workspace. Rewards range from new plants, new pages for your encyclopedia, or clues to discover locations of either of them.
As the days pass, you start seeing certain characters return and the threads that connect them start to emerge. A woman is constantly plagued with vividly disturbing dreams. Another woman vows to find out what happened to her mentor, while a police investigator seeks assistance on investigating a possible murder in the forests. A hunter is looking into rumours of a recently arisen ancient evil, while a man invites you to join a cult — coincidence much? Every day, a deeper supernatural plot beginning to unravel in the background.
While that sounds exciting, I found myself wishing the narrative focused more on the shop itself or that the game ended sooner, as the mechanics started to become repetitive and the story stayed stagnant for far too long. I think the biggest suspect for this feeling is that most plants are only sold once or twice after you discover and identify them, so the mystery surrounding them fades quite quickly. There is no sense of accomplishment for having remembered a particular plant's properties to quickly solve a later customer's objective.
Later in the game, a brewing mechanic is introduced, which I hoped would become an integral part of handling customer requests and revitalize the gameplay loop by making plant-based elixirs. I felt like it had potential with expanding on existing plant properties to add more depth to the identification mechanic. However, it was basic and was only used for a handful of objectives, which is quite disappointing as its limited use made it feel like it was tacked on to lengthen the game.
Additionally, the exploration system, where you venture out to find new plants and visit areas of interest, has a cooldown that becomes an annoyance. It is possible to lower the cooldown by watering your plants, but it was very slow and started to feel like I was over-watering my poor plants. I suspect that the cooldown is to prevent brute-forcing puzzles, but time-gating seems like an inelegant solution. I think having more interest points on the map would have balanced out a shorter cooldown or nonexistent timer.
By the end, these little annoyances began to sour the experience for me. I was still invested in finishing the game, but the magic of those early in-game days withered.
Despite my issues with its pacing and mechanics, *Strange Horticulture* remains a unique and enjoyable game. I would recommend it to anyone who has any interest in puzzle games as its puzzles are well-crafted, challenging without feeling unfair, and all of them can be solved using in-game resources.
With that said, I wished the game had revolved more around the plant identification mechanic and the day-to-day customer interactions, offering more varied customer requests that I could decipher out rather than branching into a supernatural mystery. For someone more interested in the mystical aspects, the plot may be compelling; however, for me, the charm lay in the simpler joys of running a strange little plant shop.
