Many publishers have specific focuses, and Whitethorn Games is no different. The indie publisher exclusively works with smaller, creative, and more approachable titles from independent developers. The result is a catalog of easy-to-play, relaxing adventures through a myriad of gaming worlds, and the latest from the publisher is my favorite yet. Botany Manor is a gorgeous, soft-spoken puzzle-adventure game that you can complete in an afternoon.
You explore a 19th-century Victorian manor surrounded by luscious gardens, and your goal is simple: explore the grounds for rare and exotic plants and research how to make them grow for your herbarium. It's not a difficult or content-packed game by any means, but it looks great, sounds even better, and features an engaging world filled with reasons to explore. It's also a day-one addition to Xbox Game Pass, so there's little reason not to download this bite-sized game and give it a few hours of your time.
What is Botany Manor?
• Price: $24.99 at Microsoft Store (Xbox) | Steam (PC) | Nintendo (Switch)
• Release date: Apr. 9, 2024
• Developer: Balloon Studios
• Publisher: Whitethorn Games
• Genre: Puzzle-adventure
• Players: Singleplayer
• Install size: ~3.9GB
• Playtime: ~3 hours
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Nintendo Switch
• Xbox Game Pass: Console, PC, cloud
• Reviewed on: Xbox Series X
Botany Manor is an indie game developed by Balloon Studios and published by Whitethorn Games under the ID@Xbox umbrella. In fact, Botany Manor earned the Developer Acceleration Program grant in addition to its Xbox Game Pass partnership, showing Xbox's well-placed faith in the game. It's one of many games shown at a recent digital ID@Xbox event preview, and my coverage of that event also includes an explainer on ID@Xbox and the Developer Acceleration Program, as well as an exclusive interview.
In Botany Manor, you play as Arabella Greene in the late 19th century, an aspiring young botanist struggling to obtain recognition as a scientist in an industry dominated by self-centered and small-minded men. Pursuing her love of botany, Arabella returns to her family home, a Victorian manor originally built in the late 16th century, in search of a collection of rare and exotic plants to fill out her herbarium, Forgotten Flora.
You'll explore both the manor and the grounds, finding bits of Arabella's past, notes and clues, and plenty of plants to research and cultivate. Each plant is different, though, which is where the "puzzle" aspect of the gameplay comes in. You'll have to discover what each plant needs to grow and follow those steps exactly to find success. Botany Manor is available across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, and Xbox Cloud Gaming from Apr. 9, 2024.
Botany Manor review: The good
The pros highlights
- The puzzle-adventure gameplay is casual, relaxing, approachable, and still manages to be engaging.
- The soft, pastel visuals are lovely and alluring, with a ton of life all throughout the world.
- It's a lot of fun exploring the Victorian manor and discovering secrets, lore, and new puzzles.
Botany Manor begins in a small area, slowly easing you into its gameplay by introducing you to a straightforward puzzle: explore your immediate surroundings for clues and cultivate the flower that will help purify the air and allow you to leave. Yes, the capabilities of the flower are greatly exaggerated (some of these plants basically have superpowers), but it never deters from the puzzles or worldbuilding.
Once you escape the conservatory, you'll be (mostly) free to explore the Victorian manor that Arabella calls home. A myriad of rooms, gardens, and other areas are closed away by locks, puzzles, and secret entrances, all of which you'll slowly unravel as you progress. Botany Manor does a great job balancing a sense of freedom with a guided experience that ensures you're never lost by guaranteeing that everything you need to progress will always be nearby.
None of the puzzles are particularly challenging, but they are interesting and engaging, never repeating in obvious ways and always introducing new ideas or mechanics. Each plant you cultivate will be unique and gorgeous in its own way; sometimes, you'll need to find new sources of light, use sounds, or even alter the chemical composition of the plant's soil. Whatever the answer, it involves finding clues and research scattered around the manor and using it to piece together the answers, with everything you find recorded in Arabella's Forgotten Flora herbarium.
The game is highly approachable, bereft of overtly complicated controls or systems. It's designed for anyone to pick up and enjoy, and Balloon Studios have done a great job here in a similar vein to other incredible puzzle games like COCOON (which was one of my games of the year for 2023, if you want to read my COCOON review). However, Balloon Studios also builds some accessibility features on top of that simple game design, which is always great to see.
Besides options for mouse and keyboard or controller play, you can enable single-stick gameplay (for those with limited mobility, where you can easily toggle between "look" and "move"). There are also plenty of options for camera and video options aimed at combating motion sickness associated with first-person games, such as a Vignette mode, adjustable field-of-view (FoV), customizable camera smoother, sensitivity, motion blur, and more.
It's not the most in-depth accessibility option I've seen in a game, but it's very respectable for such a small team and definitely fits Whitethorn Games' mantra of building "engaging, accessible games."
Botany Manor review: The bad
The cons highlights
- Botany Manor is a lot of fun while it lasts, but it is a very short game that you can 100% in less than four hours.
- I also noticed a number of visual and graphical glitches, as well as some awkwardness when trying to interact with smaller items.
- Finally, I desperately wish that there was some way to actually review your clues and notes through the herbarium instead of needing to hunt down where they are in the world.
I immensely enjoyed Botany Manor, but I do have some criticisms. I'll start with the easy: performance and graphical issues. The game mostly ran great on my Xbox Series X, but I frequently noticed textures and environmental assets either flickering at the edges of the screen or popping out of existence as I panned the camera around. I did slightly increase my FoV, which may have contributed to this, but not to the degree I noticed the problems. There were six achievements that simply refused to pop no matter what I did, too (the other 30 were perfectly fine).
I also encountered difficulty when attempting to interact with smaller items in the game. Nothing too egregious, just little moments of awkwardness trying to get the right thing to highlight. On the gameplay side, you compile clues and notes in your herbarium as you work toward cultivating plants, but you can't actually re-read those clues from the herbarium — you have to go find them in the game again if you need a refresher. This made adding clues to the herbarium ultimately feel pointless and made the last few chapters occasionally annoying as I had to juggle more plants and more clues.
My biggest issue with Botany Manor, though, is simply how short it is. Whitethorn Games quoted me around 4-5 hours of playtime, but I 100% Botany Manor in just over 3 hours. I didn't rush, either — I took my time exploring and even went back toward the end of the game to earn more achievements and discover more secrets. I would've loved for the game to last just another hour or two longer, especially since there's not a lot of replay value once you've solved all the puzzles. I had a blast with Botany Manor, but it was gone too soon.
Botany Manor review: Final thoughts
You should play this if ...
You should not play this if ...
I commend Balloon Studios for its first published video game. Botany Manor is undeniably charming in its presentation, with bright and vivid colors spread against soft textures and an alluring, emotional backing soundtrack. The gameplay is effortless to learn and approachable for players of all skill levels, and while the puzzles don't revolutionize the genre, they are engaging and interesting.
It's not a perfect game, and you find the end of the journey far too quickly, but you're bound to enjoy every step you take in Botany Manor. The narrative is told solely through the world and notes you find, but it's a story of a woman persevering against society in pursuit of her dreams, and the path you walk to find those dreams is lined with beautiful flowers, ferns, and weeds. Botany Manor may not compete with the best Xbox games directly, but it's a lovely adventure that's stupendously easy to play if you're an Xbox Game Pass subscriber.
Arabella is an expert botanist from every perspective except those of the men occupying positions of authority in the industry, but that doesn't stop her from compiling a book of wonderful, unique flora unlike any other. The result is a charming, beautiful little puzzle game that only falls short because it is, actually, too short.
