Games: Botany Manor; Little Witch in the Woods; Creature Kitchen; Winter Burrow; Strange Antiquities

[mysterytoast]

Botany Manor

Began: 2/22/26

Completed: 2/22/26

Playtime (100% achievements): 3.2 hours

There's not much more to say than what I already covered in my month in review. It was a relatively short game, but didn't seek to waste my time (though the bird puzzle was a bit annoying), and I liked the narrative backdrop and the contrast between society's demeaning and belittling of women, and Arabella's obvious intelligence, drive, and hard work (that the player is performing).

 

Little Witch in the Woods

Began: 12/25/25

Completed: 3/28/26

Playtime (47/61 achievements, most encyclopedia entries at A/B rank): 51.7 hours

I uh. Thought this would be a 20-30 hour experience. It took me 48 hours to reach the credits and I spent closer to 50 hours total in the game.

The artstyle, character designs, and music are fantastic (the temple theme is amazing, and by one of the old Maplestory composer teams). The encyclopedia doodles are so cute. I would categorize this closer to a collectathon than to farming/life sims, and honestly the life sim portion is also rather light - despite the relationship meters, only a handful of characters get a full set of personal quests (looks like they're slowly rolling out quests?? they just released Clara's). It's not a big deal to me since the main story does a good job of utilizing the full cast and you get plenty of personal stories just from building relationships, but temper your expectations.

Two complaints:

1) Gameplay shifts drastically between the first and middle thirds of each Act. Exploring the new areas and learning how to collect enough new materials for progression is really fun… and then once you've finished clearing the prickly vine core, things grind to a halt for village restoration. Even if you've prepped all the building materials, it still takes 2 days for each house to be rebuilt (one day to submit materials, one day to build). Things only pick up once you reach the last third of each Act and have more quest goals than "Wait for the next house to be rebuilt."Yes there's stuff to do in the middle like candy deliveries and fishing, but the game is roughly paced.

2) Poor English localization. For the most part, it is stiff but serviceable. However, Arin's Act 2 quest involves decoding symbols and selecting their text meaning from two options in a quiz. Somehow, nearly every mistake appears in this quest. One symbol is accidentally solved for you. Another symbol's provided translation differs from the quiz's options (the correct one is still obvious). And for whatever reason, each quiz set has one question with identical options. Sometimes duplicate responses are intentional, but seemingly not in this case. You just have to guess and redo the quiz if you guessed incorrectly. At least the text boxes were all in English, I guess.

Also the Warrior was so real for falling in love with a dragon. She was kinda annoying but I get it.

 

Creature Kitchen

Began: 3/26/26

Completed: 3/28/26

Playtime (100% achievements): 2.7 hours

Not all that is unknown ought to be feared. Sometimes they just want a little snack.

Rather short and sweet cooking game with no fail conditions or management, just minor puzzling to figure out what recipes each creature wants.

 

Winter Burrow

Began: 3/29/26

Completed: 4/1/26

Playtime (100% achievements): 8.4 hours

If a neutral rating existed I'd give this game that. The art style is charming, I like the side characters and their arcs, and for the most part the game avoids filler quests for the sake of filler and lets you pick up quest items early instead of forcing you to retread into new areas. I appreciate that there's an option to replace the spider model with another insect.

On the other hand, there was just enough gameplay friction and glitches that it ended up being unfun by the end.

While you can unlock shortcuts, you still spend so much time just moving between maps. It's also super easy to get lost, especially early on, due to the lack of specific location indicator plus the shape of the overworld. And this is with the map. The endgame material, spider silk, is also at the far end of the map and you spend so much time just going back and forth. There's a whole thing about there being a mole tunnel from the burrow to the birch forest, btw. In another game this would be an obvious teleport, but this isn't even a shortcut in this game.

There's no real indication of which quests will unlock axe and pickaxe upgrades. There's an effort for the shovel (both characters ask you to dig something) and the first unlocks, but the upgrades for axe and pickaxe seemed completely arbitrary.

Storage is basically infinite (great feature) but there is zero autosort option and, at least on Steam Deck, every time you shift the cursor from the inventory to storage it jumps back to the top of the storage list. And for whatever reason the UI scrolls much slower than your cursor and you can just bump your cursor off the screen. Everything about the storage UI just makes sorting a pain - I did it for final food tiers and salves before giving up. Thankfully crafting draws from storage and the inventory.

Also, I encountered a glitch where I was in the storage UI putting things away, but when I picked up the lantern it just vanished, replaced by a ghost item of 99 stones that vanished once I closed the inventory. I believe lost items go to the mailbox, but since this was a glitch the item just permanently disappeared, and no recipe for this item means there's no way to get another light for the forest. (Actually, in general every time I picked up an item while in the storage UI, I saw what I think is the default item for a frame before it populated with the correct item, and I spent the rest of the game in fear of losing rare items.)

 

Strange Antiquities

Began: 3/23/26

Completed: 4/2/26

Playtime (100% achievements): 8.2 hours

The sequel to Strange Hortoculture. I liked this a bit more than Horticulture - the wide net of "antique" allows for a wider variety of object appearances, and the increased number of identifiers (more basic senses as well as the thaumic fields and gemstones) means the hints got to be more diverse, too. The lack of cooldown on exploration is also very welcome, considering there wasn't a particular reason why it was time limited in the first game. And best of all is the keyword index - it is so, so nice to not need to flip through the entire codex. Keywords are variable levels of effective and some are completely useless, but the feature makes it easy to reference antiques and the puzzles that rely on keyword use are interesting. My one complaint is more about the ludonarrative, and was also an issue with the first game - some of the more obtuse puzzles felt more "which of the undiscovered objects most likely resembles the description" than a situation where I just don't have an answer. Which is an understandable approach (a puzzle game is meant to be solved) but I peered beyond the visage a few times.