Strange Horticulture

Every so often, a game arrives that defies easy categorization. It doesn’t slot neatly into the established genres that fill digital storefronts. Instead, it creates its own. Strange Horticulture, from developer Bad Viking and publisher Iceberg Interactive, released on Steam and Nintendo Switch in January 2022 for $15.99, is precisely that kind of game. On the surface, it presents as a simple shop management simulator. You are the new proprietor of a peculiar plant store in Undermere, a town soaked in rain and gothic mystery. Customers come to your desk, a beautifully rendered tableau of botanical tools, notes, and a purring cat, with strange requests for even stranger flora. But to dismiss this as another “cozy game” is to miss the dark, brilliant heart beating just beneath the soil.

The game is, in fact, a striking achievement of puzzle design and atmospheric storytelling. The central task is not haggling over prices but correctly identifying esoteric plants using a wonderfully tactile encyclopedia. This core loop—receiving a cryptic clue, exploring a hand-drawn map, finding a new specimen, and painstakingly identifying it—is the foundation upon which an ancient, occult mystery unfolds. Strange Horticulture respects its audience’s intelligence. It provides the tools but never the easy answers, trusting the player to connect the dots. In a market saturated with loud, action-packed blockbusters and formulaic simulators, Bad Viking has cultivated something rare: a quiet, cerebral, and deeply unsettling experience that proves interactive storytelling doesn’t need to shout to be heard. Its strong critical reception, reflected in a Metacritic score of 83, is earned through careful puzzle construction and a confident, singular vision.

• Botanical Identification Puzzles: The core mechanic involves using a detailed encyclopedia to identify mysterious plants based on their physical characteristics, scent, or rumored properties. It’s a game of patient observation and deduction.
• Narrative-Driven Gameplay: Player choices, made by providing specific plants to a cast of intriguing characters, directly influence a branching narrative. Each plant handed over is a pivotal moment that shapes the unfolding occult mystery.
• Exploration & Discovery: Using clues gathered in the shop, you explore the rugged landscapes around Undermere via a grid-based map. Each successful venture yields new plants for your collection and new threads of the story to unravel.

The strength of Strange Horticulture is not found in any single feature, but in the friction between its component parts. The experience is an exercise in methodical, almost ritualistic, gameplay that burrows into the mind and stays there.

The Core Loop: A Tactile Delight

The player’s entire interaction with the world is confined to the space behind the shop counter. This limitation is not a weakness; it is the game’s greatest strength. The interface is a desk. A plant sits on a scale, ready for inspection. To the right, the “Undermere Explorer,” a map crisscrossed with grid lines. To the left, the centerpiece: “The Strange Book of Plants.”

The physical act of solving a puzzle is a tactile delight. A request arrives—perhaps for a plant that can grant courage. The player leafs through the encyclopedia, scanning for entries that match. A customer might provide a clue: “I found it near the old dam.” Out comes the map, the corresponding square is found, and a click reveals a new plant on the shelf. Then the real work begins: dragging the specimen into the inspection area, comparing its petals, its leaves, the shape of its stem against the ink-drawn illustrations in the book. When a match is found and the correct label attached, the design promises a real sense of satisfaction. This skeuomorphic approach, where digital elements mimic real-world objects, creates a powerful sense of place and purpose. It’s a brilliant rejection of abstracted UI in favor of something grounded and real.

A Story That Creeps, Not Shouts

Many games that promise a deep narrative end up force-feeding it to the player through endless cutscenes and exposition dumps. Strange Horticulture does the opposite. The story of Undermere and the mysterious force at its center is delivered in fragments: a hushed comment from a customer, a scrap of a letter, the unsettling description of a plant’s properties in the encyclopedia.

The game trusts the player to be an active participant in its telling. The narrative is a puzzle in itself, assembled piece by piece through deductive work. That subtlety will read as a flaw to some, who may yearn for a more direct plot. We rate it the game’s most daring and successful feature. The horror of Strange Horticulture is a creeping dread, an ambient unease that builds with each new discovery. It doesn’t rely on jump scares; it relies on the slow-dawning realization that the plants on the shelf hold the power of life, death, and perhaps something far stranger.

The Burden of Knowledge

The plants are not mere inventory; they are weapons, tools, and keys. Early on, a character may ask for something to calm their nerves. Does the player hand over the gentle Storian, or the dangerously potent Long Meg? Later, there may be a plant known to cause madness, and a detective investigating a murder at the door. What then? These choices have consequences, sending the narrative down different branches. The game is not a simple visual novel with puzzles layered on top; the puzzles are the moments of narrative decision. Knowledge becomes a burden. Every transaction is laced with consequence, transforming the simple act of running a shop into a high-stakes ethical tightrope walk.

Strange Horticulture is not a technically demanding game—a 2D title of this scope is light on hardware—but its aesthetic is carefully executed. The art style is a blend of cozy and gothic, with beautifully illustrated plants and a muted color palette that enhances the game’s rainy, mysterious atmosphere. The entire UI, as mentioned, is a strong example of diegetic design, making the player feel like a true botanist at their workstation. The focus is not on graphical horsepower, but on art direction, and in that, it succeeds.

The game’s point-and-click nature finds its most natural home on Steam. The precision of a mouse cursor is well suited to grabbing plant labels, flipping through book pages, and pinpointing locations on the map. It’s a direct, one-to-one interaction.

On the Nintendo Switch, the experience is slightly different but no less compelling. In docked mode, controlling a cursor with a thumbstick is predictably less elegant than using a mouse. It works, but it’s a small step down. In handheld mode, however, the Switch’s touch screen comes into its own. Tapping on drawers, dragging plants with a finger, and pinching to zoom on the map restores—and in some ways enhances—the tactile feel of the PC version. It’s a port that offers a legitimately different, yet equally valid, way to play.

Strange Horticulture is a confident, carefully crafted game that respects the player’s intelligence above all else. Developer Bad Viking has created an experience that is both a compelling puzzle box and a creeping occult thriller, weaving its mechanics and its narrative into a single, cohesive whole. It is a reminder that innovation doesn’t always come from bigger budgets or more polygons, but from a strong, singular vision executed with precision and care. We recommend it wholeheartedly to puzzle fans, with the caveat that its deliberate pace and limited replay value are real reservations — but at $15.99, it remains one of the more memorable indie designs in recent memory.