Strange Horticulture

Super cool, I periodically replay this. Everything is great, I'd like to see more from this IP, well done all around.

Cozy story driven puzzle game that doesn't overstay its welcome. Identify plants, search the map, deal with the occult. I felt like only a few puzzles were too obtuse, so it's not really difficult.

You own a shop and you sell plants but you are also a detective! By helping your customers (selling them the right plant for the ocassion) you collect informations and solve mysteries! A very unique game that you have to play it in order to understand how it works.

Remember to label all the plants as you go!

I didn't understand the gameplay when I started, and I made some mistakes I later regretted. Perhaps the game could inform me that when a customer problem could be solved with more than one plant, the one we choose would change the ending. Only later in the game I realized that this is how this game forks story paths. I could just play it again, but it was a lot of work to catalog so many plants that I don't want to do it again. Which leads me to the next issue. The plants encyclopedia can be frustrating. It tells us about the plant's properties, but rarely helps to identify them. Instead, it gives vague clues that can often lead to incorrect identification, which I guess is part of the game puzzles. Makes me wonder why the plant drawings in that book look nothing like the actual ones. Considering 90% of the game is identifying plants, that book was supposed to help. If I had a suggestion, it would be to update the plant drawings on the book to match the actual one when we finally identify them. I cannot keep track of all the plants in my head when we have almost 80 of them. We can tag the plants, but in the beginning, I didn't know what to include on the labels that would help with the gameplay. Each plant has the English and the Latin names, and some have multiple names. The game asks you to identify by one of them, so placing labels can get crazy. Besides that, the game feels original, had a nice mood, and was pleasant to play. The story is interesting but offers little to no replayability because I already know how to solve all the puzzles, and God forbid I had to re-catalog all the plants with such a vague encyclopedia. What I can say is that it was entertaining to play, and that's what matters. I still recommend it.