A flower does not use words to announce its arrival to the world; it just blooms.
―
I love escape rooms. If you’ve read any of my other reviews about point and clicks or other logic games, it should make sense. However, I hate the time limits. I get it, of course. In real escape rooms, there’s another team waiting to start the game after you finish. You can’t spend five hours solving the puzzles. In video games, though, I would much rather take my time, exploring the nooks and crannies and enjoying the scenery while solving puzzles at my own pace. As such, I’m always on the lookout for new games that let me experience escape rooms without pressure. I may have found my ideal game in Botany Manor.
The year is 1890, location: Somerset, England. You fill the dirt-covered shoes of Arabella Green: aged 55, botanist, unmarried, with an old family mansion filled with gardens and plants. Arabella has just returned from a trip abroad. Her pockets are filled with exotic seeds she intends to cultivate for an herbarium, a book on plants. Being the late 1800s, many men of renown think that a woman playing at being a botanist is quite the jolly jest. Grow beautiful rare plants, fill out your herbarium, and prove that you’re not just as good as the men; you’re better.
Plant-y of Puzzles
The game progresses by chapters, each with a handful of seeds to find around the manor along with the clues needed to grow them. It seems at the moment you’re alone in the manor. Notes about shopping trips, propped ladders, and empty picnic grounds suggest that everyone has stepped away for one reason or another. You’re free to roam without interruption as you nurture your plants. Only twelve plants need to be nurtured to fill out your herbarium, so you won’t be here too long.
While you explore the house and grounds, you’ll find letters, notes, books, and other clues which will help you tease your seeds into flowers. It’s up to you to match the clues together, explore the options provided in your house, and do what you need to take the plant from seed to flower. For example, the Windmill Wort, the first flower you need to grow, requires certain temperatures before it will flower. Arabella’s own research and notes from friends provide all the data you need to be able to make the Wort bloom. Luckily, unlike real plants, all of Arabella’s flowers grow as soon as the requirements are met, so there’s no time wasted waiting.
Secrets in the Manor
Compared to other escape room-style games like Escape Academy, Botany Manor is fairly simple. Other games often have you digging around, in, and under to unlock all the clues. In Botany Manor, everything you need is out in the open. There are no drawers to open, no boxes with locks to crack. As long as you’re looking around, you won’t miss anything. There are standard puzzles and secrets, though, not all tied to making flowers bloom. It’s an old manor house. There are secret passages and hidden rooms abound. You’ll need to find all of them to get everything to bloom.
As far as the complexity of the puzzles, the game is fairly easy as long as you pay attention. Don’t be intimidated by large posters filled with big groups of numbers. Many of the puzzles provide more information than you actually need to solve them. It’s mostly about narrowing down what you need and when, with a little math snuck in here and there.
Where Was I?
If I had any complaints, it would be the lack of a tracking system to bring up the details of your clues. The game records what papers are important versus which are flavor as well as where they’re located in the manor. However, if you can’t remember what they said, you’ll find yourself running back and forth rereading the clues and putting the parts together. As a 55-year-old woman, you don’t move very fast, either, so the back and forth can be a bit tedious. With how the chapters work, you won’t usually have to go too far to find your clues, at least.
You also have no way to carry multiple things. If you find something but don’t know where it goes yet, you’ll need to remember where you put it down. The nice thing is, you can’t pick up anything that’s not important. If you need it, you’ll carry it. If not, you put it back. Nothing is unnecessary. If you can go somewhere with it, you need to remember it.
Final Thoughts
All in all, Botany Manor is, in my opinion, a nice, casual challenge. None of the puzzles felt cheap or depended on faulty information, and they all made logical sense. In fact, it was quite satisfying to finally put the pieces together for each puzzle and see the results of your efforts in a flower. If you’ve been interested in trying escape room games but have been intimidated by the scale and tension, or if you enjoy plants, puzzles, and beautiful scenery, consider putting yourself in Arabella’s shoes for a while. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
Special thanks to Balloon Studios and Whitethorn Games for providing us with a copy of Botany Manor for this review.
PIXEL PERFECT
Recommended
Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.
