A strange review of antiquity

During the first two hours serving strange antiquity to customers, I pulled the brown pendulum of a decorative clock at least a dozen times, wondering what meant the resulting spin and settling from the hand. I checked the index of my occult encyclopedia in terms of mention of time and compared the face of the clock to the shapes in the book of hermetic symbols. Every time I drew an empty space, just in case I jerked the pendulum several more times.

This is a continuation of the elated puzzle 2022 Strange gardening is full of promises of future puzzles: a closed cabinet without a key, a shifted cabinet without a clear purpose, three empty plinths under the store counter, an engraved desk with four mysterious fragments. AND I knew They were all tips, I just couldn’t say what.

Until, in a series of glorious moments, I could.

When I realized how the clock fits the multi-part puzzle, which revealed the modern area of ​​my store, I really chuckled with delight, and this feeling repeated several times during my 10-hour game. It is a longer and more uneven logical game than strange gardening, but also more ambitious and just as captivating.

The general concept remains the same. Customers come to your store to get a specific name. Your encyclopedia contains tips for each concrete – like shape or material – for a more abstract, such as the feeling that it evokes when you hold it, or the fact that it is used to take blood in the initiation ritual. You touch, listen and smell objects on the shelves, and if you choose the right one, you can hit it from the long list. Outside, the history of curses and cults develop, and some decisions made, such as the one that of the two elements of a given client can change the result.

The objects are ingenious: carved totems with unknown symbols, money with beigeed boxes that catch ghosts, medallions designed in the image of the god of the snake, a bloody stone kept by the vouchers of the eagle. They all look great on your shelves, but you decide to organize them. The descriptions are suggestive, sometimes with double meanings that made me want to decipher them even more. Does this necklace give me goose bumps because it is cool or because it is terrifying? Which of these wooden items could be described as a “finger”?

At the beginning, simply knowledge about the fact that the object is made of bronze with one precious stone, it is enough to identify it, but soon the puzzles become arduous, layered challenges. In addition to the encyclopedia, you get a book about gems, a book of symbols and a book of curses, and you often have to transfer many times to identify one object. A basic example: If someone comes to a curse, you will first read the book about the curse to identify their illness, you will find a curse in the encyclopedia index, and then read all related entries to identify the necessary object.

I was regularly pecked, but every time I divided the puzzle into petite fragments, I could even out possible answers. The system of tips shows you vaguely in the right direction, not to say the answer I like, but you can ask for many tips at the same time. When you solve the puzzle, you can skillfully say which tips are vital – sometimes these were details that I didn’t even notice, which gave me modern ideas for solving future puzzles.

I love the feeling of self -control he is building. After receiving a modern entry of the encyclopedia, it flashes on the screen. You can ignore it, but key information often in my head. I lost the count of the times I thought about later “Wait, I know this name”And it is satisfying to employ knowledge that you didn’t even realize that you had. The way in which the entries of the encyclopedia are affected, encourages you to follow your thoughts, and before you know, you identified three or four objects, not just one. At the end of the game I became the right expert from the shopkeeper: I knew without thinking which precious stone meant death, and what meant the fire that the symbol meant summer and which winter. Sometimes I could choose the right object without consulting my books, which was fantastic.

His best moments – as in the case of a clock pendulum – are not when you identify items, but when you poke your store, discovering puzzles hidden in the view. To open a closed cabinet in one corner, I had to manipulate the object in a way that I did not think at first that it was possible, and that the empty cabinet I mentioned earlier turned out to be instrumental in a way that I would not spoil, but was equally delightful. The scope of the game constantly surprised me and provides each of the promises that tease.

Even collector’s maps of the game hide their own secrets. Click the location and you will receive a vignette of stories, often ending with the discovery of a modern object. Tips for finding these locations – riddles, matching shapes, recognition of patterns – are simpler, but no less addictive, and then you get a device that you need to put on one of your maps to find the right places. When I figured it out, I felt like a genius.

In a game with so many puzzles and so many different types of puzzles, several misfires are inevitable. I gave up identifying a specific medallion only for the system of tips to tell me that I must first solve another puzzle, which I chose (and postpone) much earlier in the game, which seemed to be an arbitrary process. On the other hand, I narrowed him to two possible objects and I just had to guess – even when I saw the right solution, the second object also seemed to fit. Despite this, the density of strange antiquity and consistent generosity make it easier to forgive these little mistakes.

It just helped me to live a shop, listening to the rain and thunder outside. Every morning I poked the cat until he blown, and threw my papers into their drawers every night. After the first customer, I shuffled the shelves every day to match my mood. At the beginning I arranged medallions by material – bronze, gold, wood, cans – with a separate section for objects that looked particularly mysterious. Later I moved all my identified objects to a separate shelf and sorted medallions according to the color of their stone. This is not busy – it is flexibility that makes the store seem a deeply personal space.

However, I would like to move a bit easier with my mouse. When several objects seemed to match the tips, I liked to arrange them on my desk under my countertop, next to them an open book, so I could better compare their markings and jewels. To move the object from the shelves to this desk, you must grab each of them, hold it at the bottom of the screen until a desk appears, and then drop it – an irritating troublesome procedure when it includes moving four or five elements in a row. It is what is easier if you also employ the keyboard, but if there has ever been a game designed for mice in one hand, coffee in the other, that’s it. It was too simple for me to enlarge the book (double click) when I was just supposed to open it (single click).

My enthusiasm for puzzles also disappeared in the last hours, partly because his best challenges are in the middle, and partly because I did not care about what happened outside the store. The city’s story about curses, death, betrayal and competing fractions is, like all words in strange antiquity, finely written, direct and concise. Even gently poetic. But because you spend so much time burning in your books and staring at artifacts, it is simple to forget about the last development of the story. And even if you follow, history loses a rush of about two -thirds of the road, delaying and delaying something that seems inevitable.

Despite this, the satisfaction called the full battered list kept me to the end and with joy I remained a few hours to identify the objects I missed. The ups of strange antiquity – and there are many – they match everything I played this year, and I certainly put them with Blue Prince among the best puzzle games from 2025. He is devilish and delightful, and I hope that one of many more strange games.