Strange Antiquities

What does a cursed pendant feel like in the hand? Strange Antiquities asks that question in earnest, and it expects players to answer by reading up on it.

This is the second game from Bad Viking, the small British studio behind 2022’s Strange Horticulture, published again by Iceberg Interactive. It is billed as a standalone follow-up, and the description is accurate: no knowledge of the first game is needed, though returning players will recognise the rain-soaked town of Undermere and the shape of the working day. The plants are gone. In their place is a shop full of arcane artefacts (amulets, figurines, vessels, things with too many eyes carved into them), and the player is its new custodian.

The premise is simple. Customers walk in with ailments, curses and odd requests. Somewhere on the shelves sits the object that answers each one. Nothing is labelled, so each item’s materials, markings and sensory quirks get examined, then cross-referenced against reference books on gemstones, symbols and folklore until the identification holds. Between customers, cryptic letters and clues send players across maps of the town and its surroundings to dig up new stock and secrets hidden in the shop itself. A dark mystery spreads through Undermere in the background, and which items get handed over steers a branching story toward one of several endings.

In market terms, Strange Antiquities sits in a small but growing niche: the deduction game dressed as a cozy game. It shares a clientele with Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol and The Roottrees Are Dead, but it trades their forensic coldness for candlelight, rain on the window and a shop cat available for petting at any time. It carries a Metascore of 81, and that figure describes a game that knows its audience and serves it well, without trying to win over anyone new.

• Multi-Sensory Artefact Identification: Every object is inspected for materials, markings and other sensory details, then matched against reference books. The clues are spread across several sources, so each identification takes real cross-referencing.
• A Working Reference Library: Separate volumes on gemstones, symbols and folklore are the core of the game. Players have to learn how to read them, and that skill is what the game teaches.
• Map-Based Clue Hunting: Letters and riddles point to locations across Undermere and beyond, yielding new artefacts and breaking up the counter work.
• Branching Story, Multiple Endings: The item chosen for a customer has consequences, and the town’s mystery bends around those decisions.
• Built-In Hint System: Tougher puzzles can be eased without leaving the game for a walkthrough.
• Free-Form Shelf Management: Stock can be arranged and labelled however a player’s brain demands. The cat is always available for petting.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is one of the genre’s most satisfying designs, and it works because each step produces a physical result. A customer describes a problem. The books get consulted to work out which named artefact addresses it. Then that artefact has to be found among dozens of unlabelled objects, each checked against the entry’s description. When the guess is right, a label gets written, and one more item on the shelf is known. The reward is a shop that slowly becomes legible. There is no experience bar here. By the late game, the shelves are a visible record of everything the player has worked out.

Strange Horticulture built this structure. Strange Antiquities deepens it. Plants were identified largely by sight: leaf shape, petal colour, the odd note on scent. Artefacts are composite objects. A single piece may need its stone identified in one book, its engraving decoded in another and its history matched to a third. The chain of inference is longer, and that length is the sequel’s main achievement. This is no longer comparing a picture to a picture. It is assembling a case from several partial sources.

Deduction and Its Limits

That depth has a cost. Some clues are obscure enough to push players to the hint system. A good deduction puzzle leaves a player sure the answer was in front of them all along. A weak one leaves them unsure what the question was. Strange Antiquities mostly manages the former, but a meaningful minority of its riddles, particularly the map clues, depend on a leap the text does not earn. When the answer finally appears, the reaction is “really?” instead of “of course.”

The hint system softens this, and it is a sensible inclusion. Keeping players inside the game is better than sending them to a browser tab. But a hint system is a safety net and does not fix an unfair clue. A handful of puzzles here use the net as scaffolding, and a genre built entirely on player insight cannot afford much of that.

Story and Consequence

The branching narrative gives the shop work some moral weight. Customers do not always ask for what they need, and the game regularly offers a choice between what was requested and what seems wise. Those choices accumulate into multiple endings as Undermere’s mystery darkens. The system is light: closer to a visual novel’s branch points than to an RPG’s consequence web. Still, it does its job. It turns a transaction into a judgment, and it makes each customer’s story worth reading properly, where a pure puzzle game would invite skimming for keywords.

The Familiarity Problem

The most legitimate criticism is that the structure stays very close to its predecessor: the counter, the bell, the book, the map, the cat. Bad Viking has replaced the subject matter and thickened the puzzle logic, but the skeleton is unchanged. If Strange Horticulture’s loop wore thin by its final act, nothing here will change that assessment. If it left a player wanting more, this is that same thing, better made. We rate it a refinement, and a confident one, but it is not a reinvention, and the verdict reflects that.

Interface and Flow

The desk is the interface, and that is the right call. Books open, objects sit under the player’s gaze, labels get written, and the map unfolds across the counter. This is skeuomorphism used for a purpose: the clutter of a real desk is part of the puzzle, and managing it is part of the play. The freedom to arrange and label shelves is the game’s strongest quality-of-life feature. Organised players will build a taxonomy, chaotic players will pay for it later, and both are playing as intended.

The friction comes from volume. As the collection and the library grow, so does the page-flipping. Late-game identifications can involve a lot of shuffling between books to confirm a half-remembered detail. This friction is intrinsic to the design rather than a flaw, but impatient players should know it is there.

Strange Antiquities is a handsome, deliberately muted game. The palette runs to deep greens, tarnished brass and lamplit browns, and the hand-illustrated artefacts carry real character. They need to, because the art carries the clues. A marking that cannot be made out is a puzzle that cannot be solved, so clear illustration matters to the play itself. For the most part the art delivers, and objects read distinctly even on a crowded shelf.

Atmosphere is the other strength. Undermere’s gloom is dependable and oddly comforting, which is exactly the “gloomy, cozy” quality the game aims for. The rain, the bell above the door and the cat on the counter do a great deal of work with very little animation.

This is a largely static, 2D, desk-bound game, so its technical demands are modest; a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware. The practical concern is legibility. The game asks players to read dense reference text and study fine detail, and it is far more comfortable on a large display than a small one.

Steam (PC and Mac): This is the natural home. The whole design assumes a pointer. Objects get dragged, pages flipped, labels placed and a map panned, and a mouse makes all of that immediate. A monitor gives the books and illustrations room to be read. Given the choice, this is where the game belongs.

Nintendo Switch: The game suits a handheld in spirit. It is slow, self-paced and easy to pick up in twenty-minute sittings. In practice the fit is less clean. A cursor-driven interface translated to analogue sticks is never as fast as a mouse, and with this much object handling and page-turning the added friction accumulates. Handheld mode also puts the heaviest strain on the small text and fine markings. Docked on a television it reads far more easily. The Switch version is a perfectly reasonable way to play, but it is the second-best one, and buyers with access to both platforms should weigh portability against precision.

Strange Antiquities is a sequel made by people who understood exactly what worked the first time and chose not to change it. That choice is both the game’s strength and its limit. The identification puzzles are richer, the reference library is a pleasure to learn, and writing a correct label on a once-mysterious object remains one of the best small rewards in puzzle design. Undermere remains a place worth many rainy evenings.

It does not surprise, though. The structure is inherited almost wholesale, and a handful of clues move from cryptic to opaque and rely on the hint system to cover for them. Those faults keep it out of the genre’s very top tier.

They do not keep it from being a solid recommendation for the right audience. Strange Antiquities is the better of Bad Viking’s two games and a satisfying deduction game on PC or Switch. Buy it on PC if the choice exists.