Strange Antiquities

Strange Antiquities (2025) is a narrative puzzle game where you are the custodian of an occult antiquities shop. Play involves acquiring and identifying mysterious relics using clues from lore, sensory investigation (smell, weight, sound), so you can match them to customers. It stands out for the pristine tactile safety of your shop, where you methodically identify and prescribe items to customers reporting increasingly chaotic dark mysteries.

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You are the interim shopkeeper at Strange Antiquities, a shop of occult relics and arcane curiosities. Each day, customers bring you vague or cryptic requests. Some need to lift curses or cure strange maladies, while others are after more substantial interventions. Either way, it’s up to you to identify which artefact best suits their need using your reference books, experimentation and observation.

As you progress, new areas of Undermere become available to explore on the map, which offer up fresh artefacts to expand your collection. As you work to build your stocks and deal with the increasingly strange requests from customers, you build a picture of strange goings on in the town - people falling into trances, ominous portents and the encroachment of the supernatural. Do well and you can help the locals resist the dark arts. Fail, and things won't turn out quite so well.

What emerges is a game that blends the quiet contemplativeness of running a shop with the cerebral satisfaction of a detective puzzle. While you spend time cataloguing, weighing, sniffing, and listening to odd objects, you’re gradually pulled into a story that asks you to intervene in a broader crisis in Undermere.

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Our examiner, Jo Robertson, first checked Strange Antiquities 11 weeks ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 3 weeks ago.