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Strange Horticulture wasn't really at all what I expected the game would be. I didn't have all that high expectations for it and just wanted to see what it was all about, but I was actually *quite* positively surprised when starting it. Strange Horticulture feels like one big Puzzle Box, where there are tons of layers to uncover and hints to follow to unravel a bigger story and mystery - there are a *lot* of surpring mechanics in the game - from a "Papers, Please"-style inventory managment, to a big map you explore, to a lot of varied puzzles, the game kept surprising me a lot.

Strange Horticulture plays like this: You start with a shop full of unlabeled plants and a book with the names of plants and what they are used for, but that only has very vague or one-sided descriptions on what the plants actually look like, so the main puzzle of the game is to A) find all the locations on the map where the 70-ish plants you can have are, which is mostly done by following cryptic location puzzles and hints, B) find new plant entries for your horticultural book and C) combine these two things by labelling plants with the names that think are correct. Shop visitors will then come in to request certain plants, which is when you have to prove that you assigned the plant's name correctly.

While this sounds like the gameplay may be a bit monotone, the game throws a lot of mysteries and small hints at you that keep everything very fresh and exciting, and like I said before, the game feels more like a puzzle box full of small mysteries at first, than really any other genre the game might fit into. What I also admired was how well thought-out the progression on your plant collection was - assigning a plant was never too easy, but also never too hard, the plants were all unique enough that they were easy to catalogue and find again and I really admire how the game managed to have you always stay on top of the 70-or-so plants you collect and not get overwhelmed or have to read the entries again and again to find the one you are looking for. I recently played another Encyclopedia-based game like this, where this was handled *so* much less gracefully and this really made me appreciate how memorable each plant was and how the game didn't try too hard to throw you off rythm by asking about a plant you last looked at 7 in-game days ago.

All that is to say, I really loved the game, but I just wish it ended a bit earlier - this isn't the kind of game you play for *the plot* but I found the story and the worldbuilding a bit uninspired and lackluster and after 11 of 17 or so in-game days, the game started to feel a bit stagnant, because the game still needed some time to wrap up the story, but it made some mechanics feel a bit repetitive, and it just started to overstay it's welcome. There are a lot of small things that annoyed me that all came together towards the end that soured the experience a bit for me - the game introduces a brewing mechanic, which is only used ~3 times and that I found just tedious enough to actually annoy me; To block players from just brute-force exploring the whole map there is a (very long) cooldown timer between exploration attempts which I just found a bit clunky and an inelegant solution to the problem; There is a "dread" system, which feels like something that was taken out of a Failbetter or Weather Factory game, but that was just another way to limit brute-forcing and just didn't feel as thematically fitting in this game as it does in the aforementioned games, especially since there was never any real danger of reaching max. dread, it wasn't a system that was very intriguing to engage with. Also, a lot of small wishes for quality of life improvements really started to pile up for me towards the end of the playthrough (the map is always in the way, changing tags on a plant could have been made easier, etc.) which just made me feel a bit more annoyed at the game.

I think at this point it was also that I felt like the tone was a bit all over the place - at times the game tried to do the very somber, horror writing style of something like Cultist Simulator, while some mechanics tried to be more cozy and cute, while sometimes it tried to do some fantasy humor, and then it also tried to have the intrigue of talking to a mysterious terrorist in Papers, Please, but for some reason this combination of all of this just didn't land for me. The cast of characters also all were very bland to me - all characters kind of looked the same and also mostly acted the same, and I'm not saying you *have* to have a racially diverse cast in any story you write, but if all of your characters look so indistinguishable from each other it might have been a good idea to add something like that, just so players can actually tell the characters apart visually.

While this all sounds very negative, I still had a really nice experience with the game! I would have wished it would have expanded on the "puzzle box" character of the gameplay more, and would have had less of a story (or at least a good story) because what really caught me were the mysteries hidden in the shop itself and catagorizing and tagging all of the plants and I wish the game would have narratively revolved more around that and not a super generic "oh no! someone summoned a demon" storyline.