Botany Manor
86 /100
Based on 13 reviews

Botany Manor Reviews

Check out Botany Manor Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 13 reviews on CriticDB, Botany Manor has a score of:

86

Game Page
8.5/10

Botany Manor is a delight. It's sweet, succinct and serene, packed with clever puzzles that reward thoughtful exploration and engagement with its narrative. At a little under three hours it's the perfect lazy weekend getaway for those that like to stop and smell the flowers as much as they like to enrich the soil of their mind.

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

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8/10

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 than challenging.

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Eurogamer
April 9, 2024

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

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8/10

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.

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ShackNews
April 8, 2024
9/10

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 influence that one's environment can have on well-being. Botany Manor left me yearning for more botanical discoveries and I can only hope that the developers sow the seeds of a sequel someday.

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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.

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9/10

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.

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9/10

If you're looking for an easy-going first-person puzzle game, Botany Manor is a must-have. This is the ideal game to add to your spring gaming collection as you wander around a beautiful Victorian garden and manor and solve botanical-themed puzzles.

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Unscored

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 information gleaned from clues can't be read there once found, necessitating in some backtracking.

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8/10

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 life, nor from operating industrial-style farms in games like Stardew Valley or Minecraft. But something about Botany Manor‘s incredibly personal approach to gardening has grown through to...

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GameSpew
April 8, 2024
10/10

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

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Unscored

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.

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