The issue with claiming a puzzle game to be too easy or too challenging is that it’s a minefield of subjectivity; what’s too easy for one is challenging for another, and vice versa. (Dis)agreements might vary, but I found Botany Manor to be right within that Goldilocks spectrum of being just challenging yet approachable enough. It helps that the game is a calm, pleasant delight, with its one big hurdle being its own clue system when recalling information for puzzles.
In Botany Manor you play as Arabella Greene, a botanist looking to assemble a compendium of rare plants for academic purposes. The issue is that said plants must be grown first to add them to the compendium, but it’s more complex than dumping dirt and water into a pot. Some plants require particular temperatures, acidity in the soil, light values, sound cues, etcetera to grow — To go into detail would be spoilers, but it’s a quaint concept that these puzzles take the form of appeasing these bizarre plants with their bizarre requirements. Clues are sprinkled around the manor that need to be pieced together on the compendium’s page (which also acts as an objective tracker and map), and until all clues are accounted for and correctly assigned, the puzzle can’t be solved.
It’s the very nature of how the clues are handled which is my main criticism because as far as I can tell, you can’t read a copy of the clue, just a synopsis of its name and what part of the manor it’s found in. If you’re like me and need to double-check a clue a few times, you have to walk back to that location to reread the information physically. Yes, you could keep a journal handy to write things down or take screenshots, but it’s strange that the game gives you an in-universe book to record information without letting you read clue specifics from there.
This would be bothersome if not for the fact that the manor is pretty quick to get around, in part thanks to Arabella’s ability to run swiftly. Relatedly, it gets even easier to traverse the manor as the game goes on, as each chapter opens up new wings and sections, with there often being a gate or door that can be opened to link old areas to new ones.
The puzzles can look intimidating at first glance when they reference pH levels, geographical locations and so on, but Botany Manor doesn’t require you to have book smarts: All the information you’ll ever need is found within clues or at stations to put together the necessary solution, and even the math required in a few instances is merely addition/subtraction. Other than one puzzle that felt misleading with its wording for times of day/night, the puzzles all felt approachable and doable after some minutes of applied thinking, though obviously, you may have an easier or harder time by comparison.
The mechanical aspect of the gameplay is simple: placing items, turning dials, pressing buttons, and so on frequently require only one to three inputs to add, remove, or change something. This makes Botany Manor very low-risk when it comes to failures, as the ‘worst’ consequence for whiffing a solution is going back to the start or beginning a process anew.
The low-risk, ease of gameplay and approachable puzzles make the already easy-going experience all the more pleasant thanks to its soft music cues and visuals that give the manor a borderline ‘dream-like’ feeling; colors are solid, full and vibrant, with the lighting adding a particular comfortable warmth to everything when illuminated by candles, sunlight or otherwise. It was hard to get discouraged or irked whenever a puzzle had me stumped for a bit; as bold as this comparison might be, Botany Manor is a ‘warm blanket’ of a puzzle game, the likes of which I can’t compare to any other puzzle game I’ve ever played.
I finished the game in about 3.7 hours (with a portion of that dedicated to clue gathering and trying different solutions), which does feel a bit short for its price tag and the number of puzzles available, but the overwhelmingly positive experience I had with Botany Manor still merits a glowing recommendation.
