• Game: Balloon Studios' Botany Manor
• Release Month: April.
• Started: 01/12.
• Completed: 02/12.

A nice, breezy game to start us off this December. Botany Manor is a first-person adventure game all about horticultural studies and nurturing plants with the tools and information provided within the grounds of the titular manse. Your protagonist is the as-yet-unpublished botanist Arabella Greene, a 19th-century spinster noblewoman with a green thumb and a love of science, and in the process of compiling a herbarium of rare plants must bloom her own unusual saplings as subject matter for her manuscript's illustrations via whatever means she has on hand.

Each plant and the conditions for growing it has a series of associated clues that can be found in texts like books, wall charts, memos, and correspondence with friends and other botany scholars, and the first task is invariably gathering this information and processing what steps the game is asking you to perform. As the game proceeds, you're frequently tasked with growing multiple plants on the trot, so the clues you find also need to be arranged and assigned to the correct flora—if a plant comes from a mountaintop, you can probably narrow it down to just the clues that refer to the Alps or anything that mentions wind speed or altitude when discussing the ideal conditions for growth. The next step is locating the seeds: the herbarium includes notes to tell you their general location, but those rooms are not always easy to reach without finding the right key first. Once you finally have all the info and items required, it's simply a matter of planting the seed in a mobile pot and completing the associated puzzle to make it blossom. That might involve replicating a sunset with colored light filters, reproducing the right temperature, or using a camera's flash powder to fake a burst of lightning.

If it all sounds easy enough, well... it sorta is for the most part, though there were a few junctures where I may have taken a moment or two to figure out where to go next. For instance, to reach the citrus-growing "orangery" room (which is a word I'm almost certain the developers made up) where some vital seeds are located, you need to work around the broken stairway that leads down to it. That means finding a secret tunnel once used to hide Catholic priests back during the Tudor period when they were ostracized and needed allies to conceal them from the bonfire-happy protestants in charge: this puzzle involves figuring out where the secret door is and how to activate the mechanism used to open it, which made for an extra layer to that particular plant puzzle. The game does get a little more complex in Chapter 4 when it gives you four new plants to grow: this required a bit more ratiocination regarding which clues were attached to what as well as having the entire second and third floors of the house opened up for more real estate to scour for hints.

Overall, though, it's a pretty casual affair much like the other "walking simulators" it takes after—in particular Gone Home, which it shouts out with a series of little duck statues to find for an achievement—and is unlikely to tax you for much longer than a couple of hours. However, being driven up the wall with tough puzzles isn't really the objective of a chill game like this that's all about growing plants and walking around a picturesque Victorian estate, taking in such impressive modern marvels exclusive to the gentry like an elevator or a hot water faucet for the bath. Through extraneous notes that don't relate to the plants you also pick up on little contextual bits and pieces about Arabella and her backstory too, such as her decision to not get married and become someone's docile trophy wife with a cute "gardening hobby". A wife whose only task would be to raise and educate sons to become the venerated scholars of botany she herself aspires to be in an era where women generally aren't afforded such privilege or respect, even the rich ones. Whole lot of effective "show, don't tell" in this incidental worldbuilding.

I'll say that the horticultural puzzles were involved enough to elevate the game above something as passive as, say, a Dear Esther and closer to a Myst (albeit with way less note taking), so I had a great if leisurely-paced time with it as I pottered around a big mansion trying to remember what a "vestibule" was or wondering why Arabella kept old letters around from the Royal Society of Science telling her in no uncertain terms that her cooties weren't welcome in a honored place of learning, unless it was put there explicitly for our sakes as a bit of vital character study. Overall, a fine aperitif for the GOTY crammery to follow.

Current GOTY

1. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
2. Pepper Grinder
3. Botany Manor
4. Doronko Wanko

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2024

Botany Manor is not a walking simulator! It's a pretty traditional adventure game. It has a TON of puzzles and they're mostly the kind you'd find in 90s PC games. Maybe a bit on the easier side but the same style.

I WILL NOT HAVE THIS GENRE ERASURE OF ADVENTURE GAMES! LEAST OF ALL FROM YOU, MR. 4/5!

@bigsocrates: Dang, how did you know what score I gave it? I didn't even remember to include it.

I was sure to mention that it was more on the Myst side of things, it's just that whole epistolary storytelling approach has been more the domain of that specific narrative genre of late. Other adventure games do the "lots of notes, no NPCs" approach too, often the first-person ones, but it seemed like a deliberate stylistic choice here to follow in their wake. Especially with the ducks. Maybe we call the genre something less deprecating, like "duck statue appreciators".

@mento: It has become a little bit of a joke to myself that something like 85% of the games you rate are 4/5s. I like your write ups in general (when they aren't misstating the genres of beloved adventure games) but I do call the utility of the scale into question.

Obviously my "anger" was facetious so here's the more sincere version. I think a lot of what this game does well harkens back to classic adventure games, though an easier version, and I also think that walking sim is both a bit of a derogatory term and also indicates a game with somewhat different goals. Or rather I think Botany Manor has all of the goals of most walking sims (atmosphere, environmental storytelling etc...) but also wants to present substantial puzzles. I think someone going in thinking it's a walking sim will be frustrated because the puzzles can actually take a few minutes to work through, and I also think that it deserves to be placed in the lineage of adventure games, which definitely did not require NPCs or anything.

I also wouldn't call Myst a walking sim at all because of its heavy puzzle emphasis. Maybe a proto-walking sim.

Now does this actually matter? No. But I do think of Botany Manor as belonging to a different genre than something like What Became of Edith Finch even though that game also has a couple minor puzzles. It is maybe halfway between that and something like Superliminal, which is more or less a puzzle game and not a walking sim at all.

And now we must fight. HAVE AT YOU!

I had a lovely old time with this one as well! Indeed a ★★★★☆-type of soothing, relaxing puzzle experience.

While it's true it doesn't really matter, I've also referred to this as a first person (puzzle) adventure, and wouldn't have called it a ambulation simulator. Presumably the term "walking sim" was originally meant as a pejorative, but I think it has since been (mostly) 'reclaimed' by appreciators and developers alike. So I can understand why @bigsocrates got legimately apoplectic in real life. (sorry, 'shoot hot')

@bigsocrates: The big issue with the 4/5 thing is that the vast majority of the games I review are entirely decent but often just a little shy from being an all-timer, since those are naturally quite rare. I do get that I'm not really helping anyone with review scores if they all hover around the same number ("The IGN Paradox") though, but hey. "I evidently appreciated this game enough to finish and review it" tends to be where I'm at with most blogs like this, so maybe a numeral isn't strictly necessary. More of a "liked it"/"loved it" binary might work better, barring those infrequent occasions when I disliked something so much I feel a rant coming on. Or I could just review a whole bunch of crappier games and recalibrate that scale back to something meaningful. That'd be one heck of a New Year's Resolution.

What Remains of Edith Finch is actually an interesting example, because as you say it's kind of right at the midpoint of a Gone Home/Dear Esther (almost no puzzles, just incidental reading) and a Myst/The 7th Guest (mostly adventure game puzzles, some light reading, some small amount of first-person peregrination), which then leads even further on to a Portal/Superliminal/Antichamber/QUBE (almost no reading, still plenty of walking, mostly sitting in a room staring at a bunch of cubes and pressure plates until your eyes bleed). When it comes to puzzle/adventure games that use a first-person perspective there's a real spectrum of puzzle depth and storytelling depth, one often the inverse of the other. I'll concede Botany Manor is mostly puzzles and belongs more to that second group but the vibe definitely took Gone Home and its ilk for inspiration.

@manburger: Also this. Not really a pejorative if the developers of those games have embraced the term. I always found it funny, but it really does understate the amount of reading other peoples' letters you do in those games. "Walking and casual privacy violation simulators" might work better; it definitely sounds cooler.

@mento: I'm not here to try to get you to change your style, I'm here to poke gentle fun at it. I'm DEFINITELY not here to suggest you start playing more bad games.

As I said I like most of your write-ups, I just find the scores amusing. I do think a "Hate it/ambivalent/like it/love it" system might be more useful but it's not like you're on metacritic and I think most people are reading for the text rather than the ratings.

I do think that Walking Simulator to Puzzle Game is a spectrum with Adventure Game sitting in the middle. It's interesting how blurred genres have gotten these days. It reminds me of "what is an RPG" and my current answer is "everything and nothing BABY!"

I do agree with you that Gone Home and similar games was an inspiration to Botany Manor's aesthetics and structure, but I also think that this is a game that, visual fidelity aside, you could have released in 1998 (probably with hyperlink movement instead of free movement) and nobody would think it was strange or new at all. Maybe a bit too short and easy.