Welcome to my Botany Manor review. We were not given a review code for this title.
Botany Manor is an immersive first-person puzzle and exploration game about Arabella Greene, a retired botanist, exploring her generational family home in Victorian England. The manor in question is a bright, serene estate with an orchard, painting room, library, and multiple gardens. Across these picturesque grounds, you must uncover clues that explain how to revive forgotten flora using your lifelong groundbreaking research.
Set in the 1800s, you will also come face to face with the very real prejudices women in the sciences endured during that era.
Botany Manor is slow, simple, and stunning. It’s not a game for the impatient or the hurried. With 10-ish distinct rooms and several more outdoor areas, there’s an expansive map to crawl through and explore. You’ll mainly just be able to interact with potential clues and story hints, making it easy to pick out what’s important in each area.
You’ll be engaging with a wide variety of items: plants, of course, but also books and maps and paintings, a rusted pig figurine and bottled chemicals, a juice press and a fauna-centric board game that looks to be semi-inspired by Wingspan—to name a few examples.
Certain areas of the manor and yard will only open up through story progression (via the letter box), finding a key, or decoding what’s needed for a secret door or lock, so it doesn’t feel too overwhelming from the get-go. The game doesn’t hold your hand, but it is expertly crafted to give you what you need, when you need it. With the aura of old point-and-click puzzle adventures—one of my absolute favorite nostalgic genres—Botany Manor slow drips each piece of evidence to you at just the right time.
The flora puzzles are simple, straightforward, and satisfying. You’ll need to find bags of seeds and germinate each one, then uncover the unique conditions that the plant requires in order to bloom. Some flowers might require a certain temperature, others may respond well to flashes of light or colored bulbs.
The solutions are quite clever, though fantastical. Knowing about “real life” gardening will not help you here. Instead, players will be swept away into an alternate history where the best way to bloom a sprout may be to expose it to lightning or the sunset of a certain time of year.
Each flower will have 3-8 “clues” about what it needs to grow scattered around the property. Piecing them together will uncover exactly what each requires, plus provide you with the right tools to succeed. I’d recommend taking screenshots and physical notes, as the game won’t “remember” what you’ve seen for you. Even as you compile each clue in your journal, there is no way to look back at it without physically returning to where it is hidden in the game. (This is one thing I’d change, if I could.)
The goal of the game is to fill the pages of your Herbarium, which will hold space for 2-3 flowers for each of the 5 chapters of the story. The game can be completed in under 3 hours, and I’d recommend doing so on Steam if you can, as the achievements look to add another layer of fun. Plus, point-and-click games always work better with a mouse and keyboard, I find. (I played Botany manor on Nintendo Switch.)
The puzzles were all super intuitive, without the typical late game difficulty spike I’ve seen in similar titles. There were only two solutions that tripped me up, and one of them was entirely my fault for not paying attention and trusting my gut. The other was a slight, understandable miscommunication in a sketched hint. I’d be curious to see when or where others got stumped, so please do report back in the comments if you’ve given it a try! For the most part, it was a smooth experience, without the need for any walkthroughs or forum help.
Overall, Botany Manor is a short and sweet game for players who love puzzles. With no dialogue or NPCs, your focus will be 100% on solving riddles and enjoying the vibrant scenery. If you’re expecting any more than that, this game may not be for you. But for me, it was perfect. Just a quite stroll through a stunning world with my notebook, my flora, and my curiosity to guide me.
Summary
Here’s a quick summary of the main points of my Botany Manor review—for those who don’t have time to read a whole article because they have to water their garden.
Pros
- Easy puzzles with no ambiguity
- Serene and vibrant landscape
- Touching story with a satisfying ending
- A musical score with perfect peaks and valleys
- Themes of systemic sexism in academia—and personal endurance
Cons
- Some may find it short for the price
- The game doesn’t record or store clues you find
- Not for players who don’t like puzzles
Botany Manor is a relaxing game where you play as a retired botanist living in a big old house with a nice garden. You walk around solving simple puzzles by figuring out how to grow different plants. The game is all about exploring, finding clues, and discovering stories about the plants and your character’s past. It’s peaceful, pretty, and great if you like plants and chill vibes.
Considering the short length, I think a $10-15 price point will be most players’ sweet spot. So be sure to wishlist Botany Manor and watch for a sale! I don’t regret paying full price for it, though, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on anything else Balloon Studios puts out going forward.
Games like Botany Manor:
- The Star Named EOS: Deeply emotional puzzle game where the environment tells the story.
- Venba: Narrative-heavy cooking game about family, immigration, and belonging.
- Unpacking: Point-and-click organization with subtle environmental storytelling.
- She Could Fly: A documentary escape room about living with OCD.
Stay cozy, gamers!