Botany Manor

Gorgeous, perfectly designed and utterly engrossing, Botany Manor is quite simply one of the best puzzle games of recent years.

Sometimes on a dreary day, you just need to zone out into Victorian England and grow the same plant six times on accident.

Despite its brevity, Botany Manor is a wholesome puzzle game that turns academic research into an engaging endeavor. The central theme focuses on finding the conditions to allow a living entity to flourish, a concept that is elegantly reflected in both Arabella’s personal journey as well as in gameplay. The game thematically underscores the overall interconnectedness of nature and highlights the i...

Botany Manor is a colorful exploration game with clever puzzles to solve and an intriguing narrative to back it up. With each problem solved I felt gratified and smart for putting together the right clues and reading between the lines. The environmental storytelling and the relaxing atmosphere made me want to explore every nook and cranny of the manor.

A puzzler that challenges as much as it inspires, full of life and passion, even if its narrative offerings tend to stumble towards the end.

Developer Balloon Studios cultivates a beautiful puzzle game with the timeless allure of a summer's day stroll.

I’ve never had much of a green thumb. Currently on my windowsill are a struggling sprig of basil and a ponytail palm that is thriving, but has evolved into some kind of monstrous vine creature. If one were to look out on my balcony, they’d find a pot filled with the remains of dead geraniums, lost to this world for who knows how many months. I’ve never found much satisfaction gardening in real lif...

Botany Manor is a beautiful, focused and entirely peaceful game that creates an oasis where you solve puzzles and marvel at the world. It's wonderful stuff.

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...

Oh, and before I forget: Botany Manor has a nice selection of accessibility options that make the game easier to control and can help with motion sickness. Field of view, a setting to control character movement with one stick, toggle buttons for sprinting and zooming—all these are well-appreciated.

I’ve never been all that good at gardening, despite being a person who loves plants and wants a home full of them. So Botany Manor sounded like a bit of a dream to me, a game where being good at puzzle-solving makes you good at growing plants. Developed by Balloon Studios, Botany Manor is a puzzle game that doesn’t put too much stress on its players, designed to be more relaxing and therapeutic th...