Saturday Morning Gaming: Strange Horticulture

Strange Horticulture was on sale for 50% off the other day so I picked it up.

It’s weird.

The game it reminds me of after about an hour of playing is Cultist Simulator (but less stressful). It’s a puzzle game, kinda, about identifying plants and reading maps.

Here, let me go through one of the early puzzles.

Here’s your Nursery:

(You can pet the cat.)

A customer arrives and tells her story and asks for a particular plant:

So we check out our handy book:

Search the shelves…

And hand it over:

And you get another page for your book and new customers show up asking for new plants and you have various notes that you find here or there mentioning places with new plants and you can go to your map and explore the woods south of this town or the river east of that one and find new mysteries and new plants to categorize.

You can make mistakes. Like, I was asked for a particular mushroom that had blue gills and, irritatingly, when you look at your plants under the microscope, you can’t rotate them and check for, for example, the color of the gills under the cap.

You just get a description:

But… that’s enough to go on. Well, at least at first it is. I haven’t gotten past the first couple of in-game days.

But if you like the idea of investigating plants and finding new ones in an undercurrent of the supernatural… well, this game is like nothing I’ve played. Well, it’s kind of close to Cultist Simulator.

So… what are you playing?