Botany Manor review: peaceful and beautiful best-in-show plant puzzles

Botany Manor is a game that seems calculated to make me sit up on alert like a meerkat, or crash through a wall yelling like that sentient jug mascot (I am not from America, I just know he exists). It's a puzzle game about growing plants. Holy Strange Horticulture, Batman! But Botany Manor is much less eldritch, and much more gentle historical feel-good movie starring Emma Thompson in the lead role. That role - which in this case is played by you in first person rather than La Thompson - is of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who, thank God, is the childless inheritor of a huge manor and ancestral wealth, and so is able to spend the sunny days of 1890 pottering around the house and grounds researching weird, slightly fantastical plants almost wholly untroubled. So in this respect it is also a fantasy game. It's quite delightful, which is the sort of phrase I am confident Arabella would use.

Read more