Green Thumb(sticks): Botany Manor Review
All images are from Botany Manor by Balloon Studios, all images are by me
Striking the right balance between kindness and conflict in the cozy genre is tricky. Too much grit and you risk alienating your hot chocolate-sipping, blanket-wrapped target audience–too little and your walking simulator transforms into a sleep walking simulator. Balloon Studios’ Botany Manor walks this tightrope masterfully. It’s my kind of cozy game, and maybe the most engaged I’ve been in a title so far this year.
It’s 1890, and you play as Arabella Greene as she performs a series of experiments at her home in Somerset, England–THE Botany Manor. She’s here to finish writing her new book. This manuscript acts as a portal to your playthrough. It’s where you organize your clues as well as the maps of the grounds and gardens.
She writes nonfiction. Throw a proposal together and get that money, girl.
As an interactive experience, this translates to a series of strange plants that need to be researched and then cultivated. Gameplay is a cross between Escape Academy and Gone Home–with substantially less being burned alive than the former and less teen angst than the latter. I’m going to be careful not to spoil anything in this review (that’s the thing about puzzle games–the puzzles ARE the game), but an early example tasks you with growing a plant that only blooms during thunderstorms. Once you have that information, you’ll need to figure out how to recreate the necessary conditions using the limited resources available (while the scale gradually expands, the puzzles tend to stay compartmentalized to a few rooms of the house at a time). What’s considered the “perfect” complexity level will be different for everyone–but Botany Manor’s was perfect for me. I continuously made steady progress, but still felt smart each time a new sprout peeked through its soil. My brain constantly buzzed like a bee drunk with pollen.
Each success will give you access to more of the grounds (sometimes through the discovery of a key or secret passage, sometimes as a direct result of the plants themselves). The backtracking is kept mostly manageable thanks to the level design looping in on itself–think of it as the Dark Souls of Victorian science. This recursiveness is necessary given that you don’t actually pick up notes in Botany Manor. Not having some sort of archive is a truly bizarre omission (you’re literally putting together a scrapbook in the game), but if there’s a way to consult documents from a menu, I couldn’t figure it out.
On an Xbox controller, the sprint is mapped to LB. You’re welcome.
While I wasn’t terribly interested in the narrative playing out across the letters, invoices, and charts of exotic apples (whether it grabs you or not is irrelevant because you’ll be reading every single one of them as you comb for clues), the post credit sequence wraps up the experience nicely.
The borderline impressionistic game world is painted in a simple style of vibrant colors and flat textures. Other than some very mild slowdown when transitioning between areas, the performance was solid on Series X and I encountered no glitches or crashes during my playthrough. Regardless of the art direction’s simplicity, it’s still able to regularly create moments of awe. Again, I’m going to avoid spoilers, but there are a few instances where the environment transforms in the aftermath of your experiments. Each one felt like an invitation to keep exploring, keep learning, and continuing to grow.
One last public service announcement: make a note to save often. You can do so instantly and anywhere from the pause menu. As far as I can tell the game also has an auto save system in place–I believe it activates at the beginning of each new area (or maybe new chapter? Like the mansion, the exact method is a mystery). I only bring this up because late into my playthrough I paused to refresh my drink and was informed that I hadn’t saved in over an hour. It ended up being a nonissue, but nothing can kill momentum quite like losing progress. I love this game, but if a freak power outage had wiped my file, would I have bothered to retread the same half a dozen puzzles to catch up? I can honestly say I’m not sure.
I played Botany Manor in a single, three hour sitting and I recommend you do the same (if only so it’s easier to remember the location of a note that needs double-checked or where you left that rusted pig you’ve been carrying around). It’s short, but as sweet as any chloroplast produced sugar.
Hey Balloon Studios, can we get an Entomology or Marine Biology Manor next?
88/100