Game Review: Strange Horticulture
Strange Horticulture is the first game in the Undermere universe. Released in 2022, it was followed up by Strange Antiquities in 2025. Strange Horticulture is, essentially, a visual novel, where the choices you make are represented by plants — choosing to poison someone is done by giving them a poisonous plant, for instance. Instead of making choices through dialogue, you make choices through the plants.
This game is very cozy. There’s often rain, there’s a cat to pet that purrs, and it’s slow-paced. The core gameplay loop involves solving puzzles, getting unindentified plants or plant identification plants in return, identifying plants, rinse and repeat. You get a daily puzzle card to solve, and serve one client at a time at the shop, ringing a bell to summon customers to your counter.
There isn’t any RNG in this game. One thing I appreciate is that you do start with a bevy of plants to use as tools, and a number of pages in your herbology grimoire, which contain hints as to the identities of the unlabeled plants. However, the game doesn’t give you the opportunity to identify every single plant in a given playthrough. That’s what the epilogue and prologue (?) are for. I actually see this as a feature, not a bug. Too often, in puzzle games, is there this mindset that we fall into as a player. It’s like the Chekov’s gun law: if a gun appears, it must be used. Having a good number of the plant and identification pages not actually be relevant to the main story is realistic and means that one can’t bruteforce a puzzle by process of elimination.
My one complaint about this game is that the magnifying glass doesn’t magnify some details on the plants enough, especially the petals. If the game were to be updated, I’d love it if the index feature from Strange Antiquities were to be utilized. It could be a toggleable option in settings.
This game still holds up, 4 years after its release. Please note you do not have to play this game before you play Strange Antiquities. I recommend playing games in order, personally, but if you can only afford one, I’d actually go with Strange Antiquities. The difference is that Strange Antiquities has more tools to use to inspect items, more reference texts for you to use in-game, and it may be longer/have more items? but I’m not sure. I liked Strange Antiquities better, but by no means do I dislike Strange Horticulture.
It’s a really good game for streamers, if, like me:
You prefer slow-paced games
You like to let the audience make decisions in the game (given there’s no time limits, your chat can take their time voting in polls you set up regarding plant choices)
You prefer games that do not feature voice acting, so you can voice the characters yourself
