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Botany Manor review - a beautiful, bucolic brain tickler
Our review of the beautiful, bucolic brainteaser Botany Manor.
It's a wonderfully peaceful, soothingly unhurried endeavour – a seamless blend of serene first-person exploration and deductive brain teaser - that asks players to poke around the titular house and its vibrant, sprawling gardens in search of clues that, when combined and cross-referenced, reveal how plants in the Herbarium bloom out in the wild. Its colours are vibrant splashes of thriving nature, its spaces delicately, beautifully arranged, and as its rich soundscape of distant cuckoos and gently rustling leaves washes over you – Botany Manor primarily relies on diegetic sounds to create its convincing bucolic fantasy – the illusion is so complete you can almost smell the floral aromas and feels the warm summer's breeze. Sure, its rust-nibbling aquatic blooms and musically inclined ferns are fictions, but they're no more bizarre than, say, bladderworts - millimetres-high carnivorous flower capable of generating nearly 600 times the force of gravity to suck in their prey - or the Mimosa pudica, which shyly recoils its delicate fern-like leaves when touched.
Or read this on Eurogamer