Strange Horticulture

Strange Horticulture is an occult puzzle game in which you run a small plant shop in Undermere, a fictional English town surrounded by hag-infested forests and fog-wrapped lakes. The premise is unassuming — customers come in, describe what they're looking for, and your job is to identify the right plant from your growing collection — but the people walking through the door are part of a larger occult mystery that has been quietly tightening around the town for centuries.

Identification is the central mechanic. Each plant has visible traits you can compare against entries in your encyclopedia, with clues sometimes spread across multiple sources — a customer's offhand remark, a map you find on an expedition, a note tucked into a delivery. Mistakes have consequences. Hand someone a powerful poison when they asked for a sedative and the story responds.

Beyond the shop, you take expeditions across a hand-drawn regional map to gather new specimens, and the woods and lakes get less friendly the deeper your route runs. Joining or refusing a coven, helping or hindering a cult, leaning into hypnotic hallucinogens or steering customers away from them — every decision pushes the narrative in a particular direction. There are also small reliable comforts running through the whole thing: your cat sits on the desk, the wood stove keeps the shop warm, and you can pause to pet either of them whenever the occult horror gets to be too much.