Botany Manor Review - Gamecritics.com

A Delightful Stroll Back In Time

HIGH The quiet beauty of its digital world.

LOW Some slightly simplistic puzzles.

WTF Don’t forget to find all the ducks!

Botany Manor is solitary experience. Throughout the course of its fairly modest runtime, the protagonist is roaming a large manor alone, and they’ll never see another living human. The only time they indirectly interact with others is when they receive mail at the manor’s gatehouse — and in those instances, the sender is always gone by the time the player reaches the gate.

In a soothing way — rather than creepy or melancholy — the intense isolation gives the impression that the player is literally walking within, and taking stock of, their personal history and inner desires. This approach feels delightfully congruent with Botany Manor’s abstracted mechanics and slightly minimalistic visuals, and overall Botany Manor feels strange in a way that is truly unique to videogames. I may have some issues with a few specific elements, but I can’t deny that the experience was breezy and deeply satisfying.

The year is 1890. The player assumes the role of Lady Arabella, a botanist returning to her sprawling Victorian manor after a trip away. She immediately sets out to finish a herbarium for a publishing house, to be titled ‘Forgotten Flora.’ In order to complete the book, she needs to grow a list of exotic flowers, and growing these flowers is the goal of nearly all of Botany Manor’s puzzles.

The herbarium itself functions as a sort of diegetic UI element — it contains a map of the manor that slowly fills out as the player explores, as well as two-page ‘bios’ on each of the flowers the player needs to grow.

To deduce how to grow the flowers, the player must search their environment for clues and successfully match those clues they to the correct flower. These clues can take any form — a newspaper article, a poster, a hot water faucet and more. The fact that nearly any object capable of being examined is also capable of being a crucial clue encourages a certain calm, inquisitive attitude towards Botany Manor’s spacious environments. I began to regard the manor itself with the same sort of wonder and care that Arabella herself must feel, a process made even easier by Botany Manor’s bright, beautiful, painterly visuals. No offense to the puzzles, but the baseline feeling of navigation — of just existing in that digital world — was my favorite part!

In fact, while I realize that Botany Manor is a puzzler, I almost would have preferred it to have ‘cluttered’ the environment a little more, perhaps offering a few more interactable objects that weren’t clues, a bit more written material to add texture to Arabella’s world, and so on.

These things do exist to a certain degree, of course–in particular, there is a running narrative thread throughout Botany Manor related to Arabella’s position as a woman in male-dominated society and the struggles to have her scientific contributions acknowledged as hers, an extension of herself and her perspective. Other subsidiary elements of this thread (such as Arabella’s written correspondences and household possessions related to her married sister Elizabeth) further highlight Arabella’s desire for independence and a space of her own, away from the masculine establishment that insists on dismissing or co-opting her work.

Botany Manor’s chosen theme can make the isolated game environment feel even more isolated and stifling–as one explores more and more of the manor, one almost feels adrift and drowning alongside her, robbed of the ability to communicate with the outside world. However, this makes solving the puzzles and making the flowers bloom even more satisfying. With the additional narrative context, solving puzzles feels like a work of art and an act of defiance all at once.

So yeah, even more narrative context surrounding the puzzles would have been nice! As it stands, the clues for the puzzles feel a little obvious and not fully integrated into the world. These clues and their connections to each other often feel conspicuous in a way that robs the puzzles of potential challenge.

For instance, the player might come across a book on Morse Code, a newspaper article veering into a digression about Morse Code, and a portable telegraph machine in fairly close proximity, all standing out among the minimal set decoration. In these sorts of cases, it’s quite easy to begin the process of fusing these clues into a solution. In fact, at times the puzzles feel less like puzzles and more like scavenger hunts. That isn’t necessarily a problem if the vibes are on point — and they usually are — but really, if my dumb brain can consistently solve these puzzles without too much trouble, the difficulty might need to be bumped up just a bit.

On the other hand, it could be argued that the ability to solve each puzzle without gathering every clue (which I did a few times) acts as its own sort of modular difficulty slider. A truly enterprising player could challenge themselves to solve each plant’s growth using the smallesy amount of clues. And, even if I was underwhelmed by the puzzle design at times, I admit that the flower blooming in seconds at the end of nearly every puzzle more than makes up for any quibble I could bring up — this fantastical flora leads to moments of beauty, wonder, and pause.

At the very beginning of Botany Manor, the player needs to grow a flower capable of filtering air pollution. Prior to growing the flower, the area they’re cooped up in is shaded dull brown. But then the flower blooms, a beautiful color palette seeps into the scene, and it all seems so perfect for the briefest of moments. Even if I wasn’t a fan of every design decision Botany Manor made, it was all worth it just for these glimpses of transcendent beauty.

I would’ve gladly stayed in that manor for longer, if I could have.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Balloon Studios and published by Whitehorn Games. It is currently available on Switch, PC, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E. This game contains no objectionable content that I can think of. It seems completely suitable for children of all ages.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game does not offer subtitles. From what I can tell, all of the clues and instructions are delivered through text and visuals. There is one puzzle that incorporates audio to a certain degree, but I believe that it is solvable without sound. I believe this game is fully accessible.