Strange Horticulture Review

Hello all, we’re all back from EGX now and we’ve got write ups and videos galore coming your way so sit back grab a brew and read on for our first review as today Nettle Creates takes you through Strange Horticulture!

Strange Horticulture has actually been out since early 2022 but it only popped up on my radar when I saw there was a playable version at EGX and OMG WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE GAME! I get to live out my culty, puzzley, plant selling dream in game form.

The game is described as an ‘occult puzzle game’ where you play as the proprietor of a local plant store and it really does what it says on the tin!

The game starts off with you inheriting your plant store called Strange Horticulture from a deceased Uncle along with his adorable cat Hellebore (who is named after an Evergreen Perennial for anyone wondering…no…just me?!) and you have to try and get your head around people asking for certain plants. You soon have to venture out of your cozy shop and into the wilderness to find plants that you haven’t got yet but your patrons have requested however you do have limitation in that you have an exploration meter which has to be full before you go out so you do have to have a bit of strategy on when you go out. The locations of plants usually come from cryptic bits of papers or letters which you have to try and solve and go to the location on your map.

The puzzles can vary from straight forward here’s the location to having to use certain instruments to solve it and some of them can be really quite complicated, but fear not! The game allows you a series of hints, starting with a small one and getting bigger until it basically tells your answer so you never get soft locked or decide to give up.

You also get clues at the start and end of every day - you pick a card from a small tarot-like deck which has a very cryptic clue which you have to solve to find a new location. You also get a hefty chunk of back story to go with the card which helps to piece things together in the current day.

As you venture further into the game you become embroiled in a mystery with an ancient cult and you have to try and figure out a way of stopping them before it’s all too late. I found the story to be quite intriguing and I wanted to find out more and more. There were also decisions to be made on giving certain plants to people in order for the story to go one way or another which I wasn’t expecting but gave the story a bit more of an edge.

Sometimes I did get frustrated when trying to solve the puzzles and riddles as I often found I was 1 square on the map off from a plant and I had to wait for my exploration meter to fill up again before you could head out. This wasn’t so bad as it does passively go up over time and you can always water your flowers to fill your exploration points back quicker.

There was also an interesting mechanic where if you failed to identify the correct plant, you’d get a ‘sense of impending dread’ where you’d be sent to a screen with a puzzle which you’d have to solve and then you’d restart the day. It was nice to have a consequence for incorrectly guessing - you just have to remember to not try the plants you failed on again.

Overall the game was fun and I never got bored. The story was interesting and told in a way that didn’t confuse the player but allowed them to move along at their own pace. The varying mechanics were easy to pick up and understand although the exploration mechanics did mean that you had to wait sometimes to progress. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of replayability to it, but for a small indie game like this I wasn’t expecting there to be.

Overall I'm giving Strange Horticulture 9/10 on the Unnamed Gaming scale. Great mechanics, great story but could get a little frustrating waiting to be able to explore.

Strange Horticulture is made by Bad Viking and published by Iceberg Interactive and is available on Steam for £13.99, and is playable on the Steamdeck. It is also available on Switch for £9.74. I played on PC and it ran well with no issues.