And it's very gratifying that if you are the kind of player who takes a lot of time to colour code the labels on your plants, and organise them first by their usage and then alphabetically, for example, then you are rewarded. While your shelf of plants is initially quite bare, it becomes positively overflowing with gently moving flowers and fungi if you put the effort in. If you've not been curious enough, or chased down all your leads, you might not have everything you need by the end of the story. Sometimes that does depend on you having the right selection of plants at your disposal. Just as you can give an annoying lawyer a plant that will make his rash worse instead of better, perhaps you'll give someone who needs resolve a plant that actually makes them afraid at just the wrong moment. Perhaps your mysterious shopkeeper kinda likes the idea of the world ending. You're saving the world, but in the role of the mysterious shopkeeper who gives the hero just what they need. You can choose to help different parties with the plants you provide, so there are a few different endings on offer. There's a mysterious cult living in a forest, and a second mysterious cult who worship some kind of plant-based monster. Your adventures are sort of unreal your job looking after your plants back home is far more important. This helps to ground you completely in your role as a plant expert in a shop. Home is where the plants isįrom a player point of view, you never leave your shop in the course of playing the game, but you get descriptions of your travels in the top right corner, with further helpful illustrations. Each night you dream the next part of the story of a girl running away from home. As time goes on, you start gettings visits from customers who are investigating a strange murder.
Your desk has a secret drawer containing strange devices - some sort of arkane magnifying glass, and a metal disc inscribed with seemingly random symbols. Other times it's a cryptic clue from a playing card that seems to be drawn from your dreams each night.įor alongside the complaints of locals, Strange Horticulture is also quietly supernatural.
Sometimes you'll get a letter from a friend pointing you towards a mountain pass just east of a certain lake. You also get more Will To Explore, so you can unfold the area map and follow additional clues - fun little mini-puzzles where you might have to cross reference directions on a map or follow a river to its source. But each time you succeed, you get a new page or two for your book. If you give someone the wrong plant you collect some Dread, which seems roughly approximate to 'The Fear', that classic consequence of a terrible hangover. It is so satisfying and rewarding, and you begin to feel like an expert.Įvery day, you ding the shop bell to call another customer forward until it's time to close the shop. Using a partial illustration (maybe the shape of a leaf or a cross section of a flower) and a description that might give you petal colour or the detail that the leaves are very sharp to the touch, you cross reference it against what you have on your shelves, and voila. So out comes your copy of The Strange Book Of Plants. Your customers will come in asking for a flower that is a traditional gift for weddings, something that'll help them sleep, or will clear up a rash. The other part is a puzzle game, where the puzzle is "what plant do I need?" This is, after all, partly a quiet life sim about running a plant shop, where you'll be greeting customers, exploring the surrounding lands using a big map, and following little clues to find more specimins. I can do all manner of more mundane things in Strange Horticulture, though. There, my plants are happy and weird, and with them I can save the world. Apart from in Strange Horticulture, when I run a spooky and ethereal plant shop in a town called Undermere, in an alternate-universe version of The Lake District. My brother-in-law, absent any real space, has mounted glass spheres of water on his wall and grows little flowers and trailing vines from them.
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A friend of mine has a positively ebullient front room full of lush, green darlings that have names like Hercules. Apparently it was a thing, wasn't it, that my generation all got into house plants, especially during lockdown. Strange Horticulture is part ideal life sim and part puzzle adventure, where running an arcane plant shop is quiet, meticulous, delightful, dark, and beguiling.Īh, to be good with plants.
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