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Had you asked me six months ago if I had expected to play not one but two horticulture-based games, I would have thought that improbable. And yet, here we are.
Strange Horticulture has you inheriting a shop filled with plants, where you must solve the problems brought to you by the townfolk and, eventually, deal with a monster terrorizing the countryside.
Clearly, the parallels to Potion Craft are unavoidable. In both, you slowly gather plants and learn their different properties. But where Potion Craft has you using these properties to … well … craft potions, Strange Horticulture has you almost exclusively using just the plants themselves (with four seemingly tacked-on exceptions) as solutions to specific puzzles.
The overall atmosphere is fantastic – the gentle rain, the purrs of your cat, and the methodical effort of deducing a plant’s identity. Unfortunately, there’s no “day-to-day” in the game – there’s a specific storyline you will be following in a set number of days, and once you’ve deduced a plant’s identity it’s likely you won’t use it again. This takes away from the relaxed slice of life feel which initially hooked me. It may feel like I’m simply asking for padding to be added to this story, but it would be nice if you had a few regular customers who weren’t there just to advance the plot. There are many different plants, and it would have been nice to get more familiar with each of them and their different names and uses.
My only other real complaint has to do with the interface. There are just a few niggles which brought down the overall quality. For example: You have both a travel screen and a map, but there are many clues which require you to reference the map – which you can’t do on the travel screen (at least, not with the clues on-screen as well). If you find the square you want to go to with a clue, you must open the travel screen, zooming the screen around and quite probably making you forget where you wanted to go in the first place. When this inevitably happens, you have to close the travel screen which also closes your map, meaning you have to start all over with your clue. Things like this (and the side drawer of your table closing every day even though absolutely nothing else goes in that space) often drew me out of the otherwise lovely experience.
I wanted to put this into Tier One at first, but I can’t say the $15 price tag is worth the four hours you get out of it. Had the mystery you solve been only the first part of the game, I think I would have kept it there. But the shortness of the campaign and the lack of down-time makes me put this into Tier Two instead.