Put down your trowel, stop smelling the roses, and listen to me for a second. Strange Horticulture, a narrative puzzler about running a plant shop that also happens to be one of the best detective games around, is free to keep on Epic this week.
Originally released in 2022, Strange Horticulture puts players in the role of a plant shop owner newly arrived at the alt-history Lake District town Undermere. Each in-game day, numerous customers will enter your store and ask you for a particular plant, though they can usually only provide a partial description of it. Using a magnifying glass and the world’s weirdest horticultural textbook, you must identify the plants in your shop and match them to the right customers.
Through this simple yet ingenious mechanic, a dark and eerie tale unfolds. Your clientele grow weirder, the plants you discover more esoteric, and the secrets of Undermere slowly begin to reveal themselves. Moreover, by learning about the qualities of each plant, which range from remedial herbs to deadly poisonous mushrooms, you can influence the trajectory of the story for good or ill.
It’s one of the most unique sleuthing sims out there, one of many reasons why Chris Livingston awarded it a score of 90 in his Strange Horticulture review. “Strange Horticulture is the best detective game I’ve played in years, and it’s mostly about staring at plants,” he wrote back in 2022 after rinsing through its multiple endings. “I’ve fully enjoyed each playthrough, and I plan to play again. I’m fairly obsessed with Strange Horticulture and I want to discover every single ending there is.”
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The story behind Strange Horticulture is equally fascinating. Its developers, John and Rob Donkin, spent a decade designing Flash games for sites like Newgrounds before designing their detective masterpiece, inspired by a botanical text called Breverton’s Complete Herbal: A Book of Remarkable Plants and Their Uses.
“We just found this in a library one day and were like, gosh, how good is this?” John Donkin told PC Gamer’s Jody Macgregor. “It’s got all these cool plants and they’ve all got these amazing weird properties and uses. Some for I guess witchy things, others more as medicinal things. It’s just so inspiring. We just thought, well, let’s do that, but make them a bit more magical.”
Strange Horticulture is free until August 28. Now is a great time to play it too. A sequel, Strange Antiquities, is coming in September. It likewise takes place in Undermere, but switches your plant shop for an antique store, while also promising substantially more involved investigation techniques.
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