Balloon Studios
PC, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
Advertisement
Ìý
Whatever the opposite of a green thumb is, I’ve got it. While both of my parents are keen gardeners, I’ve never had much interest in plants, apart from eating them. Despite this, I found myself drawn to Botany Manor, a charming puzzle game for even the most unhorticultured among us.
First, there is the setting – an English manor in 1890 is fairly unusual as video games go. Then there is the art style, a perfect blend of riotous natural colour and more muted Victorian tones, just the right side of cartoonish. If you’re looking for something cosy and inviting, this is it – or so it initially seems.
Botany Manor places you in the shoes of Arabella Greene, a botanist working on a herbarium of forgotten flora. Wandering around the titular manor, you discover seed samples and must figure out the unique conditions that will make them grow.
This cultivation involves a combination of treasure hunt and logic puzzle, as you search the grand house’s rooms and gardens for clues in the form of everything from weather data to fairy tales. Complicating matters is the fact that you are normally working with multiple plants at a time, requiring you to match the correct clues to the right plants as you fill in the herbarium.
For example, an early puzzle sees you working out the optimum temperature for a plant called Windmill Wort to germinate, by cross-referencing a postcard from its native country with a temperature chart of various locales. You then have to adjust a boiler to hit the desired conditions. It is all fairly simple but satisfying stuff – I was rarely stumped in Botany Manor, but enjoyed the act of solving its puzzles nonetheless.
Alongside these brainteasers, the game teaches you more about Greene herself through letters and other artefacts. As you might unfortunately expect for the era, hers is a tale of rejection and scorn from a scientific community dominated by men, despite her obvious skills as a botanist. This slightly dark undercurrent to the story works well against the cheerful surroundings of the manor and spurred me on to explore further.
There are a few oddities forced on Botany Manor by its video game structure that I would have liked to see better dealt with. The first is that the manor seems to be entirely unoccupied by other people, without any obvious explanation why other than it saving developers Balloon Studios from having to animate any. Progression though the game is also artificially gated by locked doors, the keys for which are often coincidentally delivered to you just as you finish all the available puzzles. How convenient!
These are minor quibbles, however. Clocking in at just a few hours – depending on how well you cope with the puzzles – the game is like a pleasing afternoon spent at a , in the best possible way. I’m not sure it’s going to get me gardening, though.
