Hello! Our game of the week is Botany Manor. I’ve been looking forward to it since I played the demo, but, in truth, I’ve been looking forward to Matt Wales’ review even more. Matt knows plants – he gets them and appreciates them on the kind of level I aspire to deeply.
I was struck by something he wrote in his Botany Manor review – that plants are, inherently, a bit of a puzzle. I’ve been fascinated over the last few years to see a number of games turning to plants as a subject, and what’s really interesting, I now realise, is how they all approach things differently. Just to take two examples, Botany Manor is a puzzle game about working out how to grow plants – finding the conditions they need, navigating the things that will harm them. Strange Horticulture, meanwhile, is all about identifying the plants that pass through your shop. It’s plant Sudoku, as you go by appearance, use, all manner of different elements to put the right name on the right pot.
Both of these games are puzzles, but the puzzles themselves are not the same. And it’s made me ponder this morning just how many other parts of our daily lives are puzzles. Games like WarioWare spotted this years ago and exploited the understanding brilliantly. Cleaning your teeth, catching toast, trapping a bug under a glass: all puzzles, or all challenges at least.
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