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- Whitethorn Digital
- Whitethorn Digital
- Whitethorn Digital
- Whitethorn Digital
Botany Manor
Released On: Apr 9, 2024
82
7.5
Where to Buy
Where to Buy
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 20 Critic Reviews
82
85% Positive
17 Reviews
17 Reviews
10% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 20 Critic Reviews
82
85% Positive
17 Reviews
17 Reviews
10% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
There’s not a single misstep in Botany Manor. It looks fantastic, and it’s supported by a gorgeous, if sometimes subtle, soundtrack. It’s the puzzles that take the limelight, though: they’re almost flawless in design, requiring just the amount of brainwork to complete. The perfect blend of exploration and puzzle-solving makes Botany Manor an absolute delight — and as thrilled as we were that Arabella got to finish her book, we were gutted that it meant our time with her was over.
Botany Manor is a colorful exploration game with clever puzzles to solve and an intriguing narrative to back it up. With each problem solved I felt gratified and smart for putting together the right clues and reading between the lines. The environmental storytelling and the relaxing atmosphere made me want to explore every nook and cranny of the manor.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 39 User Ratings
7.5
69% Positive
27 Ratings
27 Ratings
23% Mixed
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
8% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 39 User Ratings
7.5
69% Positive
27 Ratings
27 Ratings
23% Mixed
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
8% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
It has a wonderful atmosphere, diverse puzzles, and an emotional story. I enjoyed playing this game, it's in my top 3 now! The atmosphere is wonderful and the music makes a visually pleasing game turn into a fantasy. The sound design is very satisfying, one of my favorite sounds is "picking up a book and putting it down" such a small thing but a pleasure. The puzzles are exciting, and not repetitive at all. The game introduces new puzzle mechanics with every flower while keeping a cohesive structure. The story is wholesome and compelling. I loved it! Thank you DEVS!
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Even without this small wish list of things I would have preferred to see implemented, Botany Manor packs a powerful punch as an exploration of its protagonist’s life, coupled with some engaging and well-designed puzzles along the way that even the most gardening-averse in real life can master. Best of all, it manages to deliver all of this with a gentle, light touch, with beautiful sights and sounds you can relax to even as you solve its conundrums. It’s not the most aggressively difficult puzzler out there, nor is it the longest, but it certainly makes a great case for quality over quantity. It seems like a true passion project that reminds us that, sometimes, it’s important to slow down in our busy lives to stop and smell the roses.
Botany Manor is a standout puzzle-adventure game that offers a refreshing break from the norm with its unique botanical puzzles and an intriguing, historically themed narrative. The game skillfully blends its gameplay mechanics with a poignant story set in a beautifully crafted environment, making it a delightful experience for players looking for a thoughtful and engaging adventure. While its short duration might leave players desiring more, its inclusion on platforms like Game Pass makes it an accessible choice for those intrigued by its premise.
Developer Balloon Studios cultivates a beautiful puzzle game with the timeless allure of a summer's day stroll.
Clever clues entwine with Botany Manor’s charming old English setting to make a lighthearted first-person puzzler worth tending to. Figuring out how to grow its fantastical plants kept me on my toes, and the blossoming flora painting onto the pages of my herbarium with bright colors gave me a comforting sense of achievement. I was more invested in deciphering its puzzles than I was reading the notes and letters that make up its fairly one-note story, but the variety of surreal seeds with unique traits in each new area gave an exciting cadence to the somewhat repetitive act of tracking down clues. Botany Manor is a laid-back game that doesn’t ask you to do too much, simply grow some strange plants and decompress – and sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
Botany Manor is a short but sweet exploration experience that serves to lower one’s blood pressure with serene garden sound effects, bright and airy visuals, and a relaxing soundtrack. The perfect game to play in a single sitting or boot up at random when feeling a little frazzled, Botany Manor is an experience that is easy to love and hard to put down until finished. If you’re looking for a Myst-like exploration experience but want one full of nature, whimsy, and peace, look no further than Botany Manor.
TLDR: Botany Manor is a very good puzzle game, that has a lot in common with gems such as The Witness, Myst and Obduction. The graphical artstyle is great, and the puzzles are logical in nature. 9/10.
You play as a female botanist in the late 1800s, and it's your task to study forgotten plants by solving puzzles to make them grow and bloom. You learn a little bit about this botanist through news clippings and letters between her and her friends and family that you find lying around. The crux of the story is that she tried to get into a botanical university, but wasn't allowed access, simply because she was a woman, so she went her own way in pursuit of knowledge and understanding.
The gameplay consists of walking around both inside and outside the Manor, all the while collecting puzzle clues about the plants. After collecting enough clues, you have to figure out which of these clues belong to the the given flower you want to grow. Then you have to perform the tasks that are part of the puzzle that will make each of the flowers bloom. The puzzles always felt very intuitive and logical, so I never needed to brute force a solution.
You start out in a very small fenced off area, but as you progress through the game, the area where you are able to walk and collect clues becomes bigger and bigger. You're never locked out of previous areas, so you can always backtrack, and sometimes that's necessary as well.
I mentioned that this game feels like The Witness, Myst, and Obduction. In part, that’s because of the graphical style where, for instance, all the surfaces and textures in the game feel hand-sculpted and chiseled out of stone one by one in a unique way, just like in The Witness. In Obduction, I always felt the puzzles were logical and not random or obtuse, and it’s much the same here, albeit in a bit simpler way. They are all first-person games that control like an FPS, just without the guns. You could also walk in large open areas and tackle puzzles in your own order in those games, and that’s an aspect of those games that I personally really like. Your unconscious brain can work on one problem while your conscious brain tackles other puzzles. Unlike those games I mentioned, Botany Manor doesn’t really have any abstract puzzles; here they are all about physical things in the game world, like mixing ingredients to make flash powder so that a plant that only blooms during lightning storms can bloom.
I have to nitpick about something, and it’s about the way the game handles clues. Clues are a really important part of the gameplay loop, and there should be as little friction as possible with such an important pillar. You basically find clues while walking around, maybe a letter here or something else way over on the other side of the house. When you find this clue, it’s added to a book that you have in-game, but only with the title of the clue and approximately where it was found. You can’t look at the clue itself from the book. The game expects you to either write this down in a real-life notebook or just remember it. If you don’t take good notes for yourself, you have to backtrack a lot to look at the clues. You might be collecting clues for up to four different plants at a time, and each plant can have eight or so clues, so even just remembering where the clue you need to look at again was located in the game world can be difficult. I feel that the devs could have done a better job here, and they should either not add anything to the in-game book for you or just do it properly and add everything, including the clue itself, to the in-game book.
After the first few plants, I ended up just taking a photo with my phone of every single piece of clue I found, so that I didn’t need to backtrack so much. Let it be said that I’m perfectly fine with games where you ‘have to’ take notes in a notebook, but in this game, it just feels like an oversight that you can’t click on the clue title that they add to the book. It just ends up feeling annoying. When I have to pick up my phone to take a photo, that takes me out of the game world, and it’s a point of friction. This was probably intentional from the developers, but I don’t like it at all. In Myst and Obduction, I took extensive notes myself, and I loved that there.
There was also a funny ‘bug’ that I found regarding a bathtub that you have to fill with water. When you fill it up with water, and if you take a step back while that happens, you can see the water mesh clipping through underneath the bathtub and that it rises up as the water is supposed to rise up inside the tub. When the water reaches its max height, it doesn’t clip through anymore. I get it, that’s probably a limitation of the engine or something, but it could have been solved in a better way by not letting the player look underneath or hiding it in a way.
Overall, I really like this game! It has very good and logical puzzles, a light but good story, great artstyle, and pleasing music.
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This Game have :
-> Wonderful grafics
-> Have very goodPuzzles
->IT have a chill Atmosphere
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PC
A really fun, relaxing, and gorgeous game. Simple in its setup but just a breath of fresh air to play. It is extremely short and compact, with new cozy puzzles and simple lore tidbits around every corner.
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PC
Summary Botany Manor is an exploration-puzzle game where you play as a retired botanist called Arabella Greene. Explore a complete historical English manor and its grounds. There are many rooms and gardens to discover, all set inside a beautiful countryside surrounding. Room by room, you learn more about the life and career of Arabella, an...
Platforms:
- Nintendo Switch
- PC
- Xbox Series X
- Xbox One
Initial Release Date: Apr 9, 2024
Developer:
- Balloon Studios
Publisher: Whitethorn Digital
Genres: