Botany Manor Review: "An Undeniably Charming Title"

is a delightful new puzzle game with a botanical twist, taking players around a sprawling mansion and its grounds as they try to sprout rare plants. The title comes from Balloon Studios, a developer founded by Laure De Mey, who previously worked on other unique puzzlers like, and cozy-centric publisher Whitethorn Games. Though it's a very short journey, still manages to be memorable, and provides a laidback solving experience that's quite relaxing.

Players will travel back to the late 1800s and step into the shoes of botanist Arabella Greene, who's returned home to her family's manor after a long trip. Arabella is working to assemble five chapters of an herbarium book on forgotten plants, each one corresponding to the game's five sections — though the first is just a short tutorial. The whole game can be completed in a handful of hours, with 12 total plant puzzles to solve across the grounds with varying levels of complexity.

Each plant in Arabella's herbarium has a set number of clues to be assembled for each plant, which together will illuminate how to make it grow. Options for these slots will fill as players explore the manor, and can constitute a wide array of objects — old letters, newspaper clippings, artwork, old souvenirs, fairytales, and more can all be sources of information, and they can be picked up and rotated for closer inspection. Once properly assembled, the clues in the book will be set into place permanently to signal that it's planting time.

Once each entry is fully realized, players can head to one of the planting tables scattered around the estate to fill a pot with dirt, plant the seed, and water it before doing whatever secondary steps are necessary for full growth. Without giving too much of the game's specific solutions away, these are always something delightfully creative, like playing music or showing the right combination of lights that mimic the plant's growth conditions in the wild. The only herbarium system downside is the