I always like a light game in between heavier ones and this plant collecting title is just the ticket. Thematically it’s somewhat similar to Potion Craft in that customers come to your shop with their problems and you offer them plants. Mechanically it’s completely different as it’s really a sort of deductive, puzzle-solving game. It has a decent story, mostly fair puzzles and is short enough that any missteps are easily forgiven. I’m not sure I’d want more of the same but it’s perfect as a light game.

The premise is that you have inherited a plant shop in the town of Undermere from a relative. Despite not having any knowledge of plants, you decide to continue operating the business with the assistance of a encyclopedia of sorts and the cryptic notes that are left behind. Every day, residents of the town will visit your shop to seek assistance with their problems. Usually they will want a herbal remedy for health issues, for good luck or to ward against pests. But some plants have mystical effects and may be dangerous. Everyday you will also receive information about new plant specimens to add to your collection and must decrypt the clues to go out into the world to collect them. As you serve customers, you become aware of the activities of a nature-worshipping sisterhood in the woods. They have unwisely summoned a powerful monster, leading to a spate of murders, and attracting the attention of a police investigator, cultists and others. By deciding which plants you offer to each of them, you can determine how the storyline unfolds.

So the shopkeeper as aspect of the gameplay is immediately familiar and this time you neither have to guess what the customer wants nor to do any additional work to process the raw ingredients. The challenge is the plants in your collection don’t start out being labelled so it’s up to you to identify them. The guidebook contains an illustration of each plant, but it’s in monotone and may frequently depict only part of the whole plant. So you need to carefully read the accompanying description and examine the plant itself to get the right one. I’d expected that once you have identified a plant, you’d get customers asking for it again. That would be trivially easy but the game refrains from this sort of repetitive gameplay to its credit. In addition to this, you add plants to your shop mainly by venturing out into the world. This is done simply by choosing a location on the map to visit. The challenge then is deciding where to go based on the clues that you obtain either through the cards that are unlocked every day or from visitors. Sometimes the puzzle is as simple as visiting a location named by someone. Other times, you must carefully study the terrain features of the map to figure out where you’re meant to go.

The puzzles usually aren’t too difficult. Sometimes there are red herrings in that the illustration in the guidebook might be misleading but the text description will point to the right plant. I found the map-based puzzles a little harder but consider them fair. The game gives a little latitude for trial and error and even if you do get it wrong too many times, the penalty is just a simple mini-game. I like that there continues to be little secrets to be discovered throughout the game adding new tools and twists to the gameplay. It’s neat too that the playing area is a tableau consisting of your desk with drawers containing everything you see. But I was annoyed by the smallness of the limited shelving available for your plants. Towards the end of the game, it was necessary to pack the plants increasingly close together which offends my organizational sensibilities and just doesn’t look good.

Finally while I like the setting, I had some difficulty feeling engaged with the characters or the plot. Everyone else are doing things and conspiring while you seem to lack agency, interacting with them only by way of choosing plants for them. It’s hard to care about what happens to them under the circumstances. There’s also a disconnect with the gameplay mechanics and the story. Just why does getting customers the correct plants unlock additional entries in your guidebook? Just where are the daily clue cards coming from? It’s nice that there are multiple endings but in the end, I just didn’t care.

The developers have since released another game in a similar vein Strange Antiquities that I’ll probably pass on. I liked the puzzles here well enough but the theme of it being about collecting plants is very superficial. You never need to even water them or care for them in any way. Once you get the plants, they’re just there to be offered to customers. This combination of light puzzles paired with shallow theming seems to have found its share of fans but it isn’t for me.