I like puzzle games but I’m not especially good at them, so it’s very important to me that any puzzle game I play finds the sweet spot between looking difficult, but not actually being difficult. I love The Talos Principle games, for instance, but I noped out of the third part of the Road to Elysium DLC because it’s such a brutal ‘eat this, smart guy’ from Croteam and my brain just isn’t built for that kind of thinking.
I bring this up because Botany Manor sounds very much like my kind of puzzle game—lots going on, but not too intellectually taxing—and it’s free right now on the Epic Games Store.
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Botany Manor is a cozy first-person puzzle game that casts players as botanist Arabella Greene, who despite her apparent retirement is exploring a Victorian manor in the late 19th century in order to complete her botanical research book. It’s got a little bit of a Witness vibe, maybe some Blue Prince, but unlike those games (neither of which I came close to finishing) the goal in this one isn’t to make you feel bad for not being smart.
“We have put a lot of thought into this game because it has a very nice peaceful setting,” lead developer Laure De May told us in 2024, just ahead of Botany Manor’s launch. “We didn’t want the puzzles to be too challenging, but obviously also not too simple. I guess the challenge in this game comes from, how many clues there are to find, how many steps there are, how many things to keep in mind, and also how far things are spread out.”
That sounds more like my kind of puzzle-game scene, and the reviews on Steam (which we rely on because Epic doesn’t do user reviews) bear that out. Even some of the negative reviews are, well, positive: One says it’s a “great game for cozy/casual gamers” but warns that if you’re looking for something more akin to The Witness, Blue Prince, or Myst—all of which, as I mentioned, Botany Manor kind of superficially resembles—”this is not for you.” So, yeah, it’s for me!
(I should note for the record that I did finish Myst, and I did it without a guide, because guides hadn’t been invented back then. (Okay, fine, they had been invented, but you had to put a lot more effort into getting your hands on them, and in some cases pay like $2 per minute to call a 1-900 hint line, and no I am not making that up.) So I am capable, I just don’t have that kind of energy anymore.)
This is the first time Botany Manor has gone free on the Epic Store, so that makes it notable too: There’s definitely no chance you’ve already picked this one up in a previous giveaway. And yes, the Epic launcher sucks, I know, they know, everybody knows, but this year for real it’s going to get better. And if it doesn’t, hey, there’s always Heroic.
Botany Manor, along with the Poison Retro Set for Pixel Gun 3D, is free on the Epic Games Store until February 12.
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