I was really excited to play Strange Horticulture because it seemed tailored to my interests in many ways. I'm a cat-loving plant dad who's happiest when it's raining outside. I love detective stories, especially interactive ones.

Strange Horticulture is a game set in Ireland-adjacent geography in which you play as the owner of a plant shop. You have a little black cat named Hellebore who sleeps on your desk. You can see the rain through glass greenhouse windows. And - as the game progresses - a mystery unfolds before your eyes.

You interact with this mystery through dialogue with customers. The game takes place over a couple of weeks, and each day you welcome folks one by one through your doors to exchange gossip, sell remedies, and trade secrets. At the start of each day, you draw a clue card from a deck that will lead you to new plants. The way you get to an area once you figure out a clue that intends to lead you there is by opening up a gridded map and clicking a square that corresponds to a labeled column and row - e27, for instance. If you solve the clue, you are rewarded with a blurb of text and a plant or two. If you misinterpret the clue, you are left to try again. While you can progress through customers with unsolved clues in your inventory, you will come upon one pretty quickly that will need a plant that you can only gain by solving its corresponding clue.

Similarly, you receive cryptic letters and codes throughout the game that you must interpret correctly to gain plants to sell to patrons in exchange for information about other plants. All the while, you're labeling the plants you think you can identify in your book until you confirm them. You can organize your plants on shelves however you see fit. You can pet the cat (and pick up some Steam achievements if you do it enough times - HOORAY). You unlock a few items here and there that let you interact with your core item set differently, but that's pretty much it: get plants, get info about plants, label plants, use plants, rinse, repeat.

Meanwhile, mysterious figures flit about, a series of murders goes unsolved, and cultish mischief reigns throughout the verdant forests, scenic peaks, and small towns on your map. Will you be the missing piece of the puzzle? Or only make matters worse by letting your rare collection of horticultural specimens fall into the wrong hands?

If you think this sounds good it's because a lot of it is. The atmosphere of the game is spot on. Purr-fect for pluviophile plant people like me. The concept of doing a detective point and click game through the mechanics of running a plant shop is strange and brilliant. And the whole spooky vibe the developers and writers obviously worked very hard on cultivating hits home. A huge accomplishment in itself for an indie title like this.

My problems with the game, however, start with the fact that I would much rather just sit and listen to the rain and pet Hellebore every once and a while than actually play through its progression loop. Labeling and organizing Strange Horticulture's variety of make-believe plants felt fun for about an hour. After that, it quickly came to feel like homework, and there isn't enough added to the plant identification process as you progress to make it feel less monotonous.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to interpret these clues that are decently written - judging by the fact that I get close to clicking on the correct square - but imprecise enough that it takes me a couple minutes of clicking around to find the right one for a lot of the clues.

And, here you're probably saying - wait, Jonny, a couple minutes of clicking around? How big is this map? Just how wrong were you? That, my fellow owl, leads me to the worst part of exploring in this game. Every time you click a spot on the 33x17 map, your "Will to Explore" is used up. Then, it slowly begins refilling. The only thing you can do to speed along the refill is to pick up your watering can and water your plants. I would be so much more okay with this if there was an actual plant-care system in the game. But there's not. There's only watering a couple of the same plants over and over to get back your "Will to Explore," to click another spot on the map that - close but no cigar - isn't the right one, only to pick up your watering can once more and go through the entire process again.

That's not even mentioning that a lot of the time I was watering mushrooms in a clay pot. I don't think that's how mushrooms work. And, if it were, the ones in my shop would be terribly overwatered, drowning in my desire to click the map just one more freaking time because that clue has to be pointing somewhere around here.

In a vacuum, this whole watering plants to gain back your "Will to Explore" thing is not terrible. It's even a little cute the first or second time. After all, it's only about twenty seconds of watering. However, when I finally clicked the right square after two or three near-misses, the feeling that I had was one of frustration rather than triumph. It felt like the game had wasted my time. I know that allowing players to click the map willy-nilly wouldn't work great either because then they could stumble upon key locations without having figured out their corresponding clues by spamming the mouse, but I think there's a solution that feels more meaningful for this game. It's just not there yet.

As it stands, even slightly misinterpreting one of Strange Horticulture's scribbled clues can lead to what can only be described as very not-fun Battleship against yourself for a number of minutes. And, frankly, that kinda sucks.

Meanwhile, while the vibe of the game's mystery is cool, it is written in such a way that its interlocking clues and narratives are gratuitously vague until the end of the game when their interconnectedness is told to you rather than implicitly linked within the narrative. This feels all the more defeating when what you've been doing all game has felt so reasoning-heavy. Effectively, you're given agency to solve which plants are which - and don't get me wrong, this is cool. But it's repetitive, and the rest of the game's mystery leaves something to be desired in terms of interactivity.

It pains me, but I've got to give this one a 6/10. I would still recommend buying it and playing some of it to soak in those beautiful spooky, rainy vibes. But beyond that, it wasn't fun or revelatory enough to justify what it was asking me to do.

Where it shines:

• Spot-on atmosphere
• Great concept
• Creative mechanics
• Spooky

Where it fades:

• Feels like Battleship
• Imprecise clues
• Travel credit system
• Gratuitously vague