
Strange Horticulture stands out as one of the best Adventure/Simulation titles in recent memory.
93
Verdict
95%
Steam
90
IGDB
Verdict score based on confidence-adjusted Steam reviews?
Very Positive on Steam (95% positive from 15K reviews)
Critically acclaimed (90/100 critic average)
Compelling narrative and story
Rich open world to explore
No significant drawbacks reported
Strange Horticulture is a 2022 video game by British independent developer Bad Viking, published by Iceberg Interactive for Windows, Nintendo Switch, macOS and Xbox One. Described as an "occult puzzle game", Strange Horticulture involves the discovery and identification of a fictitious herbarium of plants for sale to a range of mysterious and unscrupulous customers. Gameplay involves the completion of puzzles by matching the details of customer requests of plants to their descriptions, opening up access to more plants and identifying information.

Runs well on modern hardware.
Last updated 4d ago
satiates my inner loot goblin, curiosity around plant identification and want for games related to the occult.
This game was okay the concept was really cool but, I found a ton of the actual gameplay metrics to be extremely tedious for no good reason. I really liked organizing and labelling all of the plants but, as you were organizing them there were a ton of spacial glitches that would cause your plants to fly away to different areas than they were placed making it really easy to lose them or never be able to find them later. I aso am certain a lot of people would hate constantly organizing the plants and there should be some kind of indexing feature because, when you get all the way up tp 77 plants keeping track of what you have and haven't identified, even with tags, was impossible. I also had a massive issue with the microscope feature, the entire game is based on ientifying plants by putting them in a microscope to get a closer look but, the tray was extremely hard to put a plant into resulting in it taking like 5 tries each time just to look at plant, very frustrating. As for the story I found it kind of hard to follow and while most of the puzzles were very good some of the ones that involved locating things on the map were nearly impossible for dumb reasons like, you'd think you got something but, it would actually be one square to the side for no discernibe reason and the instructions just were super unclear. So this game is fun but, it could have been much more fun if they had just tweaked a few issues that should have been caught in the game testing phase, it feels unedited. I hated having to do things over again that I had already solved only to realize the plant just yeeted away getting lost or I solved the puzzle but clicked the square that I thought was "the edge of the forest" when they meant the next square in that was all forest, tedious stuff like that ruined it for me and wasted a lot of my time not having any fun.
Fun & cozy game! Makes you think, but not overly changeling.
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