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The gatehouse bell is ringing again in Botany Manor, the music swelling with the anticipation of you running all the way there through manicured gardens and beautiful Somerset stone walls to see what's been delivered. It's usually a key to a new part of the house, although it's probably better if you don't question why your family has locked off parts of your house until you've grown certain plants or discovered a set clue, Metroidvania-style.
There's definitely something slightly odd about the Greene family, behind the veneer of how beautiful their stately home is, but I can't help feeling protective of our silent protagonist. Arabella Greene hasn't let anything get in the way of her passion for plants in Botany Manor. She's clearly an older woman now, as you'll discover exploring the rooms of the family estate, but she's spent her life dedicated to understanding and researching plants despite the circa 1890s patriarchy's best efforts at telling her to stop. Rejection letters from a university can be found interspersed with books she's written on the subject.
That research focus is carried through your playtime, with the gameplay involving solving puzzles to figure out the criteria for making a selection of unique flowers bloom. Rooms and new locations within the vast estate will open up the more you explore and understand, with each place offering up a selection of clues that will link to the flowers you're researching.
A lot of the clues are fairly abstract too, and it's only when you're close to finding all the necessary clues for a certain chapter that suddenly it'll dawn on you exactly why you've been reading a children's fairy tale about butterflies. These are no ordinary flowers, after all, but unusual blooms that require specific conditions to bloom, which could well include often ridiculous criteria like recreating how a sunset looks at a precise time of year or mimicking the resting heart rate BPM of a woodland creature. I'm not sure they're 100% botanically correct, but figuring out what conditions each of these flowers needs is an intriguing, head-scratching experience.
Apples and stairs
Grabbing all the clues and figuring out how they each fit together is mostly a case of trekking back and forth all over Botany Manor. For each bloom, you'll get a hint that you need a certain number of clues. You can manually plug them into the gaps on each page, and they'll lock in when you've successfully identified the right complete group. You don't necessarily need to do this, but knowing you're on the right track is satisfying.
Most of the time you won't mind retracing your steps because Botany Manor is a beautiful setting. It reminds me a lot of the stylized natural beauty of Jonathan Blow's The Witness but without the hideous obtuseness of its puzzles. It is slightly frustrating though that you can't revisit the clues you've collected from your notes. You can only see where they're located and then use that info to head back there to re-read them. Subsequently, my phone's photo roll is full of random snapshots of letters and textbook pages that I know I'll need access to on repeat. There's a lot of very specific data you need for this research, so being able to quickly refer back to them would streamline the process somewhat.
However, Botany Manor never outstays its welcome. It's split into five chapters, each containing a small selection of flower puzzles to solve, and even with additional notes to find that give more of Arabella's backstory, even the slowest run-through is bound to take little more than three hours or so to complete. Although I'd love there to be more to it, Botany Manormanages to present the slightly more whimsical solutions in a way that's never frustrating or obtuse. If you're stumped, it usually means you've missed a clue somewhere - but thankfully you can see a chapter's total clue count from the outset, so you're not left wondering.
Botany Manor is perfect for a gentle afternoon of puzzling, particularly if you've got Game Pass and fancy stretching your grey matter with some colorful, quirky solutions.
Botany Manor is out now on PC via Steam, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It's also included as part of Xbox Game Pass. You can check out what else we've been enjoying in our Indie Spotlight series, or head to our upcoming indie games list to add some gems to your wishlists.
