Strange
Horticulture

Strange Horticulture (2021) is an occult puzzle detective game where you run a plant shop. While you identify and sell new plants to your customers you discover and influence their interweaving lives. It's unusual because your power is in your knowledge of your plants and the challenge is how you wield this to affect the story and unravel Undermere’s dark mysteries.

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Play involves finding and identifying plants so you are ready to serve customers who come in with a range of peculiar requests. One may be after a plant improve their hearing another may seek a remedy to sleep, open locks or find lost items. If you diligently follow clues and put time into research you can be ready with the right plant for their needs.

Once you have found a plant using the map and clues, you can put it under a microscope to identify it with your trusty encyclopedia. This enables you to put your plants to work depending on their powers. There's a lot to keep track of but the game lets you organise your store how you want. You can use coloured labels, shelves or maybe decide to leave it unsorted. Similarly you can decide how you progress and experiment with different remedies. There's not always a single way to do things, and that's part of the charm.

But more than the single puzzles, it's the way the stories intertwine and reveal the larger events of the world that is most intriguing. At the narrative deepens you gain more powerful plants that can influence the unfolding events by helping or hindering your different customers.

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Strange Horticulture 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 11 weeks ago.