Soapbox features allow our writers and individual contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve mulled over. Today, Kate has a blue finger…
Come on. Sit down. Shut. Why haven’t you played yet? weird gardening not yet? No, that’s rhetoric. And also, a trap. I said shut up, didn’t I? You must listen.
Okay, okay, I won’t actually yell at you for not playing this game, because that’s not the way to get people to listen to you. I wanted to highlight the excellence of this hidden Switch gem, because GOTY season tends to trample all of the smaller, quieter indie games in favor of blockbusters with seven-child budgets. numbers — but even so, those little indie games can do a lot with the resources they have, and that’s exactly why I wanted to draw your attention to Careers. Strange Garden.
Bizarre horticulture is pretty much everything I want from a narrative game: Conspiracy, mystery, subtext and GREAT MAP. It lures you in with plants, and captivates you forever with something deeper and scarier than you might expect. If you like code, The Forgotten Cityor Return of Obra Dinnyou will love this too.
You can choose to interact with this plot however you want, as long as it involves flowers
You play as a gardener who runs a plant store, and people come and ask you about specific flowers and leaves for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they have abdominal pain; sometimes they are trying to poison their bad husband. Hey, there’s no judgment here — although it’s important to know that not only can you refuse requests with which you disagree on ethical grounds, but you can also bluff the claimant thinks you’ve given them what they asked for, instead offers them a deadly sleep-inducing plant but in the end the victim is unharmed.
But the plot begins to unravel when you stumble across cults, horrors and conspiracies, and suddenly even the innocuous claims start to seem like they’re part of a conspiracy. some great backstage. Alternatively, you can choose to interact with this plot however you want, as long as it involves flowers. You can “accidentally” poison others, help the enemy, and generally just stir things up for its own good, all by providing your customers with plants.
Strange Horticulture is a master class in implicit narrative design in which the player is presented with events and can make decisions based on those facts without the need for a game. tell you what must you do. If I leave a bottle on the table that says “poison”, I’m not telling anyone to poison anyone else, but someone can draw conclusions about the contents and application of the bottle just from the label. Likewise, Strange Horticulture gives you plants that look the same, but have different effects, and then walk away, whistling indifferently. Hey, you’re the gardener, aren’t you our error if you get it wrong, right?
I like games that trust players to use everything in their toolbox without having to be handed tools. It’s a growing genre — Return of Obra Dinn, Outer wilderness, Witnessand Ao Dai all quite convenient and when hands free, they allow for these wonderful moments of self-discovery. There’s a feeling that the game exists without you, and you’re just exploring it, like a museum, and organizing everything on your own without the actual state of the game changing.
I like games that trust players to use everything in their toolbox without having to hand over the tools
Strange Horticulture is much more appropriate of these, as it carefully removes new plants to advance the plot, but it still captures the feeling of discovering things on your own—it never tell what you have to do, to the extent that there are some things it doesn’t tell you at all. There’s a lot you need to learn by reading between the lines, capturing the subtext or simply by asking yourself, “I wonder if this will work?”, and honestly… There’s no better feeling than finding the answer to that question a hearty “yes”.
So Strange Horticulture is easily one of my Game of the Year, and I really hope that 2023 brings more of the same. Now, go play it. Or you will be in trouble.
What is your most underrated gem of 2022? Write me an essay in the comments! And weird garden out!
