Even after many years of playing video games, I still sometimes come across some I don’t quite know how to describe. It’s an exciting thing, but also deeply inconvenient when part of your job requires you to, well, describe games. Strange Horticulture calls itself a puzzle, but it isn’t a puzzle in any way I associate with the word.
Strange HorticulturePublisher: Iceberg InteractiveDeveloper: Bad VikingPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on PC on 21st of January
You are the horticulturist, nameless and mostly voiceless, welcoming patrons into a shop that consists of many shelves of different vibrantly coloured plants and flowers, as well as a desk with a drawer. As a player, you can interact with the desk and its contents, as well as plants, of course.
The core gameplay loop is rather simple – clicking on the bell on your counter simulates a customer calling on you, requesting a plant for medicinal use or other purposes. The plants in Strange Horticulture have all been created for the game, and there’s a lot of love in their individual design, both visually and in their descriptions.
At first you don’t know the names of the plants on your shelves, so you check in your trusty plant encyclopedia and make an educated guess based on the visual description, or the description of a plant’s properties. You can get an additional hint by looking at the plant through your microscope. Once you can match a plant to a name, you can stick a little label on it.