The plant identification part of the game is great, and I loved the fact that it wasn't just comparing encyclopedia illustrations to plant sprites - instead you have to actually read the descriptions, and occasionally even take into account where and how you found the plant. The only caveat is that sometimes the book entries are too vague, and depending on the order you acquired the plants in you can end up with multiple of them fitting the same description. Even process of elimination doesn't always work since you might not have all the encyclopedia pages available, and thus it becomes pure guesswork between multiple options. But that is a rare case and the game is forgiving enough towards mistakes, so I didn't mind it too much while playing. Although I still wish plant descriptions were more... well, descriptive.
By the way, the plants in the game are not real - mostly. I recognized one single plant which actually exists in real life (Dead Man's Fingers, a woodland fungus), but it has a different Latin name in-game. Encountering it made me wonder if perhaps there were more, but I couldn't find any other in-game plant which exists on this side of the screen, although there are plenty of similarities with various real life plants. So if you're looking for actual horticulture knowledge, that's not in the game - but fantasy flowers are still interesting enough, and I liked reading about them. (Though they could use more cacti and succulents in the mix!)
It would be nice if the game had some sort of a note taking feature aside from plant labels, especially to assist with remembering which plant does what - I kept forgetting a few key ones, having to leaf through the encyclopedia in search of them multiple times. But in a way that's part of the charm: you have to either organize or have a good memory, otherwise you'll start struggling when you have plants on every single surface; not unlike a real shop keeper's plight, I imagine.
Outside of plants, the puzzles are what I'd call medium difficulty. They require some thinking, but they aren't exactly hard to crack - not to the level of needing to whip out a notebook and draw charts or solve equations. They remind me of escape room fare, the same combination of figuring out how to interpret the words of a clue and which object to use to follow up on it. I never had to use hints for the entire game, and the only genuinely frustrating time I had with a puzzle was self-made: I forgot about a game mechanic introduced earlier. XD
Almost all of the puzzles can be solved as soon as they appear - which is nice, - but there are few exceptions which require clues only provided later in the game. This combination resulted in two occasions of me thinking I was being a fool and missing an obvious solution, when in reality there wasn't enough information provided. That was kind of confusing, but I might just be too impatient for puzzle games of this sort in general. Overall, this laid-back type of puzzles is a good fit for the game - it balances very well with the story!
Speaking of the story, one thing that I wish was more present in the game is the unraveling mystery aspect. There is certainly a mystery in the game - but it's not too complex, and you don't exactly unravel it as much as it unravels itself while you observe. The story is good, I enjoyed it a lot, but the player influence is limited and you don't actually need to do any detective work yourself; you only need to find correct plants, which the game more often than not tells you names of. Any impactful choice is obvious, and the game will not allow you to accidentally give a wrong plant to some random customer, or deliberately try to poison anyone without a prompt. Not that I wanted to, but it would be a curious game mechanic...
And the characters for me ranged from "very likable, I will be upset if something happens to them" to "why are you a special character, you barely have any impact on the story". I'm not sure if the latter category would have had different importance on another route of the game, but in my game I kept waiting for two of these people to do something important, only for both of them to pretty much disappear into the ether halfway through, having offered no meaningful effect on the plot whatsoever. And I was very interested in them initially, expecting some sort of a character arc with life-changing consequences brought in by the player... (Edit: upon reading the forums, it seems that they do have more importance for other endings - but I still wish they did more in the one I got too).
That aside, interactions with characters are good, they all have interesting personalities, fit well into the game's atmosphere, and I don't think I ever grew bored of reading letters or dialogue during my time playing. And by the way, in relation to reading? The option to make in-game font more discernible is a great addition, and so is the ability to zoom in on any item or note. Very nice, and probably saved my near-sighted self a headache of getting too close to the screen.
The art in the game is pleasing, the sound design is good, the only bug I ever encountered was a harmless note duplication, and the interface works well (at least with a mouse). It's now one of the few games in the genre I ever finished, and it certainly gets my cactus stamp of approval - and my recommendation to people who like fantasy plants, relatively challenging puzzles and relaxing gameplay. I would be more wary of offering it to someone interested in the detective part of the game, but even then it might be a good choice for those who like reading mystery stories and not necessarily trying to solve them in the process.
Good game, has flaws but nothing too bad, I enjoyed it, can use more cacti.
Thanks for reading, and have a great day! :)
Comments
Post a Comment