Botany Manor is a game that seems designed to keep me on the alert like a meerkat or to make me scream through walls like that knowledgeable jug mascot (I’m not from America, I just know it exists). It’s a puzzle game about growing plants. Holy weird gardening, Batman! But Botany Manor is much less otherworldly and much more of a gentle historical feel-good movie starring Emma Thompson. That role – which in this case you play in the first person, not La Thompson – is that of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who, thank God, is the childless heiress to a huge fortune and family wealth, so she can spend the bright days of 1890 wandering around her house and grounds, examining strange, slightly fantastical plants, almost entirely undisturbed. So in that respect it’s also a fantasy game. It’s quite enjoyable, as I’m sure Arabella would exploit the term.
The game is divided into several chapters corresponding to the research book that Arabella fills out with the aim of submitting it for publication. I say that Arabella is almost completely uninhibited, if you pay attention, you’ll discover letters or articles telling the story of how Arabella’s knowledge was passed over in favor of, or even stolen altogether, by less talented men over the years, because botany is a science and Victorian women were supposed to marry and embroider. It’s a story that suggests a full but frustrating life, but it makes the ending all the sweeter if you follow along.
Your primary concern, like Arabella’s, is the plants. Each chapter gives you a certain number of plants to plant and flourish by recreating a specific environment in which they thrive. To do this, you look around the environment and collect clues, and there’s no on-screen quest marker or prompt to “Collect Clues for Sapphire Gloom (1/2)” when you get to work. Instead, you read various materials or examine objects scattered around, then lock on the clues you think are relevant to a particular plant – and the game tells you when you’ve done so. You still have to read the clues, because even if you find them, Botany Manor won’t tell you what bits of information you find are correct. At no point does Arabella say something like “I should check the chart I saw earlier to find out what breed of bird this is, what color flowers it’s attracted to, and what kind of pot and fertilizer to use to get that color in this plant I’m trying to bloom.”
No, you have to make these connections and do all these steps yourself, and many of them are surprising, specific, and lovely. You find a note about roasting chestnuts in a fire and look at the pot you’re holding with the seed that won’t germinate in the water; you compare a train ticket you found to the type of wood that grows in the area to get the kind of smoke you need. Many of the plants are heightened, fantasy versions of plants that evolve in real life and show the exquisite balance of ecosystems. Urbanization of a section of river reduces the number of local birds whose songs are indispensable for the growth of a very scarce fern (because the birds nest in it). Many of the clues are based on children’s stories and folk tales – like a plant that catches sleeping fairies at night, which ends with you staring at illustrations of moths.
As you complete each section of the book, you gain access to more and more areas of the manor, either by solving puzzles or finding keys, and the creators have clearly put in a lot of effort to make it a pleasant place to be. There’s no reason you should be able to look across the valley and see the field across from you where the cows are, but you can. The fact that you have to pay absolute attention to the clues you find means you pay attention to everything around you, and it’s a radiant, springy 3D world on a nice day — the kind of day you might leave your picnic blanket out — that makes your heart soar a little. It’s an ecological game, in a way. I loved looking at the plants I grew and thinking about how their shape might assist them in their natural habitat, and I really enjoyed putting them all in one room.
As a result, Botany Manor is an incredibly placid and focused puzzle game, even as the puzzles get more complicated. It’s a haven of peace. You know that everything you need is somewhere around you, and that you have all the time you need, and that makes solving puzzles incredibly satisfying – because no one’s helping you at all. You can spend time cataloging apples. You can look for different models of ducks that are wandering around. You can examine the cards on the board to discover which animal’s heartbeat will set off that meadow plant. I only wish Botany Manor was longer – I’d buy every DLC you could think of, whether it’s the succulent pack, the Winter Plants special, or whatever – but I suspect it’s perfectly balanced.
This review is based on the version of the game provided by publisher Whitethorn Games.
