Botany Manor (Xbox Series X)

Botany Manor is a game about growing flowers, but it’s not quite the simple task that it sounds like. How do you make a flower bloom when it normally only blooms following a lightning strike? How can you make a flower from a frosty mountainside grow in sunny England? Those puzzles are Arabella Greene’s passion though, the unusual flora she’s found proving to be a source of great puzzles in this relaxed first-person video game.

 

Set in 1890, Arabella Greene is a well-to-do woman whose manor is lush with beautiful vegetation, the estate such a lovely visual marvel that the game offers ample places to just sit down and appreciate the clean, bright, and colorful visuals. There is no pressure to do things swiftly here, Botany Manor mostly about Arabella walking around her mansion and trying to figure out how exactly some exotic seeds in her collection can be made to bloom. As you cover the grounds consulting notes and considering what tools you have on hand though, you’ll also start to find things not tied to your botanical work. Letters and other documents help you to better understand Mrs. Greene, mainly that her passion for botanical science is unfortunately unappreciated in her time. Botany Manor may have fanciful flowers but the realities of 19th century England mean such work is not open to a woman yet no matter how capable for it she might be, but still she presses on, and learning more about how she tries to pursue her interest makes for a nice underlying and understated story in a game where otherwise the main goal is just to compile all your notes on the abnormal flora into a single tome.

When you first enter the titular manor, you’ll find your progress forward limited, and this is for your benefit. Botany Manor organizes itself into a few chapters, each one having a few plants you’ll need to discover how to grow before you can move into another part of the estate. This is particularly helpful because it makes the scope of each plant’s puzzle fairly manageable. Walking into the available rooms, you’ll start to find objects or information that doesn’t always have an immediate apparent purpose, but soon you’ll start to notice trends or connections, and eventually things will lock into place to help you realize how you can make a flower grow. The flowers you are cultivating here are a bit fantastical but not to a completely unbelievable degree. That earlier mentioned plant that grows in response to a flash of lightning sounds abnormal, but there are “hurricane lilies” that springs up after extreme rainfall in real life. You won’t get true edification on authentic plant species, but the ones concocted for this game all have intriguing conditions behind what makes them sprout that require some thought to properly substitute for. After all, Arabella can’t control the weather, so you need to consider what’s on hand that can simulate the unusual conditions that will allow these species of plants to thrive.

While you are asked to connect the clues in the journal you carry with you, oddly enough the game doesn’t keep the clues in the journal, meaning sometimes you may have to backtrack if you forgot important details. At the same time, connecting details usually is fairly manageable. You may find something daunting like a list of various wind speeds or the temperature of rivers, but often such things are about properly identifying the relevant info and then moving to where it can be used. No two flowers bloom for the same reason, often meaning you’ll need to engage with some new mechanism or material to cultivate the flower. Luckily, since every plant is grown in a pot, you can even carry what you need to grow with you easily enough. Botany Manor remains quite creative throughout in concocting new ways you can receive the useful information on what to do, some clues scientific, others personal, some coming from newspapers and others fairy tales. There’s no secret what counts as useful information because it will be available for noting down in your journal, the details on Mrs. Greene’s life are properly kept apart rather than serving as some sort of red herring, but then there are also other small puzzles like figuring out how to undo locks that throw in something different to consider briefly.

 

While compiling info on some of the Forgotten Flora focused on can lead to some deeper considerations, Botany Manor doesn’t make any of them overly tricky. There are twelve plants in total that do get more advanced deeper into the adventure, but all relevant information is available on hand as needed so you don’t need to memorize things like Morse code and there’s still room for mental legwork in organizing specific clues so it’s not a given the answer will just click into place once you know everything. Botany Manor does feel like it has more room to grow though, the process of elimination and decent information management seeming like they have room to continue expanding, but in a game that features moth calendars and the musical notation of bird songs, Botany Manor at least remains constantly imaginative and surprisingly accessible despite some apparent room for deeper complexity.

THE VERDICT: The plants are the puzzles in Botany Manor and some impressive creativity was applied to making each one bloom through rather unique ways. The beautifully lush manor is smartly divided to make information management easy enough without the puzzles losing their edge, the player uncovering how a range of objects can be used to provide the flowering formula they learned from a wide range of clues. Having Arabella’s story subtly told as you’re scrounging around for relevant information gives this work more heart than that relaxing and satisfying work of making the Forgotten Flora bloom, the plant types exotic enough to be neat mysteries yet still just close enough to reality to feel all the more fascinating.

 

And so, I give Botany Manor for Xbox Series X…

A GOOD rating. It would be easy to say covering the mansion grounds at times can be a touch slow even with the sprint, and it would be easy to say the fact the hints in your notebook are more about connecting them than consulting them later slows things down as well, but it rarely felt like either held back the puzzle solving of Botany Manor. So long as you don’t leave any ongoing plant research incomplete before turning off the game, it’s not like the game ever feels like it gets too confusing in how connections should be made. Even if you come back to the game after a time, keeping things contained to sections of the mansion grounds helps to limit the variables and get you back on track quickly too. Botany Manor isn’t even that long when you factor out how long the 12 plants will take you to solve, and the game doesn’t demand really strange leaps in logic. It’s a neat and tidy puzzler with a lot of nice touches to appreciate, and while some later flora show the game handles expanding the scope of a single plant puzzle well, it might have lost some of its sweetness if it started getting too complicated. While some hints perhaps come out too loudly in providing their important info, Botany Manor provides some tasks that are intriguing to rope into plant cultivation conceptually that can make uncovering the blooming formula a bit more magical. Arabella’s own story being gradually fed to you by extra notes is a nice cherry on top too, a way to get you a bit more invested in your work compiling her discoveries without it distracting from the important details you need to pick up during your searches.

 

Botany Manor is a precious flower, small and humble in some ways but beautiful in its details. A lot of love and care was put into bringing it to life and there’s a lot to appreciate about it. Botany Manor shows it has a lot of imagination when it comes to creating smart and diverse ways to potentially bring its flora to life, making for the kind of puzzle format you wish you could just keep exploring since it so deftly mixes partial believability with smartly delivered clues. Perfectly pleasant, Botany Manor may be more of bouquet of good ideas than a full garden, but it’s hard not to appreciate the creative ideas in this arrangement.