Botany Manor Isn’t Afraid to Have Thorns – Botany Manor (PC) Review

Botany Manor is one of the most charming games I’ve played in a while, but if you looked at screenshots or gameplay footage, you might be misled into thinking that when I say “charming,” I’m referring to the gorgeously focused art direction, or the whimsical plant-based puzzles contained within it. While those aspects are indeed valuable contributors to the game’s overall appeal, it is the writing that really won me over—not what I expected from a cutesy laid-back puzzle game. Botany Manor offers an engaging story that pushes you forward through the titular estate’s myriad rooms, learning the history of its denizens while serving as the framework for its plethora of puzzles.

Playing as Arabella Greene, an elderly English botanist, your overall task is to finish up researching a handful of plants for her debut herbarium, “Forgotten Flora,” at the behest of her publisher-to-be. Starting in the greenhouse, you solve a basic puzzle that introduces the game’s controls and overall puzzle presentation, before you’re allowed to wander the premises and start the game in earnest. Botany Manor is split into distinct chapters, with Arabella needing to complete research on two or more plants per chapter, upon which more of the manor is unlocked to the player, leading into the next chapter. Puzzle solving is the core strength of the game; every puzzle is solved by successfully triggering a given plant’s ideal growth conditions, but finding out what those are and how to achieve them makes up the bulk of each chapter. This brisk explanation truncates what is consistently a healthy admixture of exploration, investigation, and experimentation. Leveraging its own art style and whimsical premise, Botany Manor features fantastical plants which react to all kinds of external stimuli, ranging from weather to sound to animal activity (often through roundabout means as befitting a puzzle game), and it’s up to the player to study the clues strewn about the rooms and use them in conjunction with the manor’s various contraptions to bring each sapling to bloom and complete her research.

One of my favorite aspects of puzzle-solving in Botany Manor are the various documents which serve the double duty of fleshing out the setting and characters while also keying players in on which devices and techniques should be employed for which plants. Being as vague as possible for this example, there’s a folklore book with a peculiar story involving a plant, and the story ends up being critical to understanding how to bloom it. The book provides necessary context to understanding certain aspects of the environment, which link over to another element of the puzzle. Every document is like that book; perfectly couched in its respective context, giving a weighty realness to them that breathes life into the game. Newspaper articles follow the same cadence you’d expect of reporters investigating an odd river phenomenon. Letters from official sources have a cold formality, while ones from Arabella’s sister are warm and playful. It’s through these texts that the game’s setting is fully realized—another reason I adore it so much. There is an efficiency in the writing that is unbelievably potent for a game of this scope and scale. And they’re necessary too! These aren’t just lore snippets or optional collectables: Most of them are pieces of the puzzles themselves, offering vital information about each plant. Acquiring this information is one step of the puzzle-solving process, and the game allows the player to assign documents like books, newspaper articles, and letters to each plant’s entry in Arabella’s herbarium.

This is a delightfully ingenious way to corroborate disparate information and sets players up for success. Getting stuck on any puzzle, even when you have all the information, is really frustrating, and assigning these clues to each specific plant helps organize the information and refocuses attention on the puzzle as a whole, as the player will know which clues correspond to which plant. It’s not necessary to assign information in this fashion, so players with no need or interest can skip this step without any penalties, but when working on four or five plants at a time, it becomes more useful and adds a degree of satisfaction on its own, as a plant’s page isn’t fully complete without its clue assignments. This clue assignment feature’s effectiveness cannot be understated, as it turns what might otherwise be a bother or struggle point for some players into part of the puzzle-solving process, reinforcing the core strength of the game and smoothing out the experience overall.

The only downside to this system is that the actual text in the clues themselves are not collected. If you find a temperature chart, and you know the chart corresponds to one plant, but you forgot which entry on the chart relates to the plant in question, you’ll have to manually walk back to the chart to review it, rather than selecting the entry in your clue catalog. This is a minor downside, as a little inconvenience is often necessary to keep players engaged in a game with no stakes. Botany Manor affords the player many concessions as a more relaxed puzzle-solving experience, and being forced to backtrack through the gorgeously decorated and realized rooms and lawns of the manor is hardly a punishment at all (especially since Ms. Greene is a spry old woman who can sprint with the best of FPS characters, though I am a bit crestfallen that she cannot bunny hop.) This is the only point of the game’s design where I could see someone reasonably arguing “I wish this element worked differently,” which speaks to the game’s sheer quality.

After reading a fair number of decades-old letters, newspaper articles, correspondences, and books, the story of the titular Botany Manor and Ms. Greene herself winds its way out into the light. The manor is old and contains its share of surprising secrets, but I will set them aside to focus on Arabella Greene’s narrative, as her history is a spectacular example of how such few words can invoke such a strong connection and emotional bond with fictional characters, even silent protagonists like Ms. Greene. I mentioned before that Arabella is an elderly Englishwoman; what I have not mentioned is this game takes place in 1890. Our understanding of Arabella’s history is made manifest through private letters and official documentations; she grows up and becomes fascinated with the botanical sciences, seeking to further the collective understanding of the myriad plants in her neck of the woods.

As you might expect, she is disenfranchised constantly by men who believe academia and fields of science are exclusive realms which are forbidden to women. A fellow woman in her family desperately seeks to set Arabella up with one of her neighbors, citing that it’s for “Arabella’s own good” as she’s getting on in years and won’t be able to bear children if she keeps up with her silly little flower obsession. There’s one absolutely infuriating story about Arabella going on a brief nature excursion with a notable botanist and his wife, and another young man roughly her age. Arabella makes an actual botanical discovery about a peculiarly-shaped mushroom and brings it to the botanist’s attention, and he dismisses it as her confusing the mushroom for a different species; you find a published book about this newly discovered mushroom by the botanist later, and the unremarkable young man is accredited on the cover, with no mention of Arabella.

These are heart-wrenching, incensing revelations that burn in your mind as you solve silly little flower puzzles in your silly idyllic manor. The whole veneer of the game gets covered in a dusty sheen of would-be triumphs and denied opportunities. They’re the kinds of anecdotes that stick with you because of how real they are, juxtaposing with the warm atmosphere and stylized art direction of the game. There’s no blood or gore in Botany Manor, but its portrayal of the institutional and systemic desecration of this poor old woman’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge and harmony with her environment over the course of decades is just as gruesome.

Botany Manor surprised me, to say the least. While its plant-based puzzles, detailed corridors, and well-kept gardens were what drew me in, I did not expect to be drawn into the life of Ms. Arabella Greene so vividly. Her story is told not through bombastic cutscenes or epic expositions of her storied lineage. It is quiet, and quaint, and gradual, blooming in the light of a lazy midday sun, but it is no less stunning for it.