Weird Gardening Reviews
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need to know
What is it? An engaging puzzle game about identifying plants and solving puzzles.
developer: bad vikings
Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
audit date: RTX 2080, Intel i7-9700K, 16GB RAM multiplayer game: No
association: Official website
Strange Gardening is the best detective game I’ve played in years, and it’s mostly about staring at plants. As the new owner of a small shop in a quaint Victorian town, I have only three things: a small collection of unusual and unknown plants, an aging botany book with a handful of entries, and my wits. With them, I’ve managed to solve dozens of little mysteries, solve a few big ones, and save the world.
Then I played it again and didn’t save the world – but I did Unleashes unspeakable horror. And, this time? I murdered a guy straight out of a plant because he was kind of rude.
Strange gardening takes place almost entirely behind the counter of the plant store, with customers visiting one by one every day. Sometimes they know the name of the plant they’re looking for, but usually they only have small details—they know it has red flowers, or that it treats a stomach ailment, or that it’s a great wedding decor plant. Sometimes their name is wrong, or it’s only known in Latin. Sometimes the lack of information is actually a clue: a guy who doesn’t remember anything about the plant he’s looking for, or even why he’s in your store, may be looking for an herb that can improve his memory.
Using a few details each client gave me, I browsed the plants on my shelf and dragged them to my desk to double-check. I then flipped through the pages of my botany book with plant names, drawings and descriptions, trying to figure out which plants should be given to my current client. Everyone who enters my shop gives me a little mystery, and thanks to the beautiful and soft plants, beautifully illustrated pictures, and detailed descriptions in my botany book, they are always easy to solve. After I made my best guess, I handed a plant to the client and the game would tell me if I was right or wrong.
(Image credit: Bad Vikings)
the power of flowers
It’s also very tricky, especially as my inventory slowly grows from just a few plants to a massive collection of nearly 80. My botany book is full of new entries, leaving me scrolling through lengthy tomes while playing the plant detective.Patience and careful inspection are required – just because a plant has heart-shaped leaves doesn’t mean it is if only Plants with heart-shaped leaves, and sometimes even details like the smell of the plant, the number of petals, or how its leaves feel under my fingers come into play.
The drawings in the book are excellent and very detailed, but often they don’t show the whole plant – sometimes the drawings only show the leaves and not the flowers, or even more oddly small stems or bulbs with cross-sections that look like actual , the same as a complete factory. Dragging plants under my microscope to stare at them and peruse descriptions takes time and close attention, but successfully identifying plants is incredibly satisfying, little mystery with a handful of clues.
There is only a slight penalty for giving someone the wrong plant – screw it up three times in the same day and you’ll lose your mind, Lovecraft style, having to play a short mini-game to piece it together (you won’t lose any progress ). But even this small deterrent isn’t needed. Identifying plants correctly is such a joy, and when I make a mistake, I disappoint myself more than any punishment the mini-game can provide.
(Image credit: Bad Vikings)
In addition to helping customers in the store, there’s a large map that unfolds on your desk that you can tap to access its location. Browsing a map is usually a letter from the postman, or a lost note found in a forgotten drawer on your desk, or a cryptic message every night after you close the door. The map is the other half of the Strange Horticulture detective experience, where you can decode clues to discover the location of new plants or events.
The map puzzles are not as challenging as identifying plants, but the puzzles are still creative and varied, and the bonus – more plants for your store! – Make every discovery worthwhile. As you progress through the game, you’ll receive new tools that unlock different ways to discover more hidden locations. Halfway through bizarre gardening, an alchemy system is also introduced, giving you even more mysteries to solve as you try to identify and mix several plants in the lab.
(Image credit: Bad Vikings)
Fungus Among Us
One of my favorite moments is when a woman walks into the store and hands me a note from her husband who found an unusual mushroom in the woods. After checking the notes and map, I was able to figure out where he collected the “mushrooms” and I took one back to my store. A few days later, the woman came back and said her stupid husband had eaten mushrooms and was now sick. Do I have an antidote?
I feel like a real Sherlock Holmes, even though I’m just staring at mushrooms so I can cure a man’s stomach cramps.
I just happened to find (by solving a completely unrelated multi-part puzzle) a list of five mushrooms, the symptoms they cause by eating them, and the cures for each. So I started checking the mushroom entries in my book, first finding out the names of the mushrooms the dummy had eaten, and then finding out which plants healed him.
It was difficult – there were several mushrooms that looked similar – and I wasn’t entirely sure my identification was correct, so I had to resort to eliminating all the other mushrooms in my collection, and their cures, this flower Staring at fungi and flipping through my botany book for a long time. When I finally narrowed down all potential treatments to one, I turned it over to my worried wife. The game told me I was right, and I literally put my hands over my head in celebration. I feel like a real Sherlock Holmes, even though I’m just staring at mushrooms so I can cure a man’s stomach cramps.
(Image credit: Bad Vikings)
In addition to customers looking for herbs that can cure poor eyesight or ease an upset stomach or help them sleep, there are recurring characters who visit the store repeatedly with darker and grander purposes. There is a mysterious dark entity, whose power is slowly growing and threatening the land. Some characters you meet want to banish it back into the darkness, while others want to control it, or kill it, or worship it as a god.
Choices that arise from time to time lead to branches in this story, and you make those choices the same way you do everything else: with plants. A hunter came to my shop and said he wanted to face the dark beast and destroy it, and asked me for a plant that would give him extra fighting power. But a cult member came by a few days ago and suggested that I give the hunter a plant that would weaken him, and it’s up to me whether I’m on the Beast or the Hunter. A librarian, an occultist, and a mysterious hooded woman in a mask have their own agendas, and likewise I have to choose which side to take and which side to betray. The dialogue (in words, not voiceover) is excellent, written with as much skill and care as the descriptions in the botanical book.
(Image credit: Bad Vikings)
scary little shop
There’s also all sorts of satisfying chores to do while you play. Your books, maps, letters, clue-filled notes, magnifying glasses and other items can be dragged around and placed on your desk, or stored in your desk drawer that can be opened and closed. Plants can be rearranged on racks and watered with a small watering can. At the end of each day, I find myself tidying up all the new plants I harvested that day, tidying up my desk, putting everything in the right compartment in the drawer, and closing it as if I were actually running a business. Like a plant shop (and detective business!) and want to keep things neat and tidy. Did I mention you have a cat? It sits (and naps) on your counter. You can pet it and it will purr happily.
He was rude to me and I decided to poison him. I don’t regret it at all.
You can have the game automatically tag the plants you identify correctly, but I like to enter my own tags, especially when I’m not 100% sure about my survey work. Early on in my first game, a guy gave up on plants because he didn’t feel good about them. “Bad plants?” I wrote on the red label, which I attached to the pot. I quickly found it when a similar description was mentioned in a note a few hours later. I just wish I was as organized in real life as I was in my little plant store.
I’ve played Strange Gardening three times now (my first game took about 7 hours). I made a different choice each time and experienced three different endings (at least eight of them). In one ending, all of the recurring characters from Gardening Strange survived, though one was maimed. In another game, several people died and one was driven mad. In the third, a guy died just because he was rude to me, and I decided to poison him. I don’t regret it at all.
(Image credit: Bad Vikings)
While the plants and their identities don’t change in subsequent games, depending on your choices, different alchemical concoctions can be brewed, and characters’ fates vary widely. I enjoyed every game so much, I plan to play it again. I’m pretty obsessed with weird gardening, and I want to discover every ending. That’s what a good detective does.
While I love the main storyline of witchcraft, demons, and obsessed cultists, I’m excited to study all those beautiful flowers, herbs, and mushrooms, flip through my botanical book, and post bright little ones on everything I own. Labels are correctly identified. Maybe people think I’m just a little factory owner solving a puzzle. But I know the truth. I am the greatest plant detective in the world. You really shouldn’t be rude to me.
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