Recent reviews by Daiz

The dice mechanics in this game are really neat.

The English translation quality leaves a lot to be desired. The dialogue reads very bland and translation-ese, but the far bigger issue is that basically every single mechanic and card effect in the game (of which there are *many*) is explained poorly enough that it is extremely hard to be completely sure what anything does without trying it out in practice and deciphering it from there. Like when you have an upgrade option called "Add Card Draw" with a "Card Draw: 2" stat underneath it, you'd expect buying that upgrade to increase your card draw to 3, right? But no, instead you add a new card to your deck, while your card draw remains at 2. What? I ran into enough situations like this in the short time I played that it unfortunately turned me off from the game completely. The deckbuilder space is crowded enough that I simply don't have the time and patience to put up with this when I could be playing something else that doesn't suffer from these issues instead.

A solid amount of variety and the impeccable vibes from the excellent audiovisual presentation can keep you playing for hours in a zen-like trance. Theoretically the interface and play experience could be slightly polished, but the biggest downside is that the hardest difficulty feels too reliant on good RNG at the start to get runs going at all, leading to a lot of early resetting. Thankfully this can be mitigated by just playing on lower difficulty. But while we're on the subject of lower difficulties, my other difficulty-related gripe is that Eternal Jokers are locked behind a relative high difficulty level - they are a considerable enough gameplay changer (most importantly, a Joker being eternal isn't always going to be negative, it can very much be positive as well!) that I would personally like to either see them on base difficulty already or alternatively have them added into the mix on the second difficulty already so you could play base difficulty + eternals, without having to deal with any of the other difficulty modifiers.

Also, while I already praised the audiovisual presentation at the start, I have to give an extra shoutout to the music - it's amazing how you just don't get tired of it despite the game's soundtrack consisting of basically just a single song with some slight variations. One does not simply achieve something like that unless the single song is really, really, REALLY good. Mad props to the composer.

Gets a bit grindy toward the end but overall an extremely easy recommendation from me. There is a ton of charm to the story, characters and the world and besides the casual shop management there is just a lot of stuff to find and discover in the world at large, as well as more story-affecting choices than you probably think.

Definitely deserving of its IGF accolades.

Just finished unlocking the last of currently available 80 achievements, so figured it was a good time to leave a review.

This game does so many things right that despite some its shortcomings (most notably visual clarity, need an option for player projectile clarity pls) this game is really really fun. Natural synergies make it fun to build your character every run and the game isn't afraid of letting you become disgustingly powerful if you can work things out in your favor. Also has plenty of variety in the amount of characters, items and weapons (though some of the more niche synergy options could use more enablers). I also really enjoy that the game doesn't require you to grind for dozens of hours to accumulate metaprogression stats before you can start playing the "real" game and that a lot of the metaprogression options are about tweaking the game in various ways rather than just directly making you more powerful, and that there's a limit to how much of the metaprogression tree you can even use at a time. The difficulty system with the selectable Cinder difficulty modifiers also works nicely.

As said in the beginning, this game simply does a lot of things very right. Two big thumbs up from me for any action roguelike fans.

One of the better roguelike deckbuilders out there. The gameplay might not be all that deep for the genre but the short runs make sure it doesn't overstay its welcome and also make it easy to come back to from time to time for a couple more rounds. Very much worth the price of admission.

Got this game because plant identification & cataloguing is something that I'd like to see more of in games. Got all achievements in around 8 hours.

I had an okay time with the game, but you should know going in that this is ultimately more of an adventure game with some branching choices, as the gameplay is rather shallow. I wish the plant examination had been more in depth than just getting a paragraph of text and connecting that with a book page, like being able to look at and touch different parts of plants manually. As things are in the actual game though, I recommend making sure the "auto labeling of plants" is enabled in game options.

The game could also do with a lot of quality of life features for making the plant cataloguing less of a mess. The desk interface being clunky to operate is a feature in games like Papers, Please because there you have to operate under a time pressure, but there are no time pressures of any kind in Strange Horticulture, so quality of life features would only go toward increasing the enjoyment of the game, especially on secondary playthroughs.

As an example of potential QOL, highlighting new entries in the book, and being able to mark entries as identified (or guessed) in a way that shows up in the table of contents would already go a long way. It would even fit thematically - if you were a florist trying to catalogue your plants in real life, you could very much take your pen and make some notes in your plant book about species you've identified already. Similarly, being able leave labels as bookmarks on a page (that you can quickly jump to) would have gone a long way toward reducing the many instances of "guess I'm gonna have to flip through the whole book again to find out which plant had this effect". And just to clarify, these "find the effect" tasks were thematically my favorite - it's just that the lacking cataloguing tools of the game made them more frustrating than rewarding. I could have always busted open a notepad next to the game (and I did for some things like the ritual) but I am of the opinion that for a game about cataloguing plants it really should present all the appropriate tools for doing so within the game itself.

The will to explore requiring time to charge is also basically meaningless due to the lack of any time pressure elements.

Speaking of secondary playthroughs, it was pretty disappointing to find out how fixed all the events and everything in the game. I don't think I saw anything new on my second playthrough outside of what came from different picks in multiple choice options. Even all the puzzles are the same, save for the table buttons... but on a second playthrough the table buttons are almost completely inconsequential, as you already know how the disc works. The disc, the cards, the ritual and the plants are all the same.

The dread mechanic also feels woefully underutilized and even often mislabeled in what accrues it. Like sure, you get three points of dread for "oops, that wasn't the right plant to give you, sorry", but a policeman telling you "a gruesome murder has happened in the vicinity" is apparently not dreadful at all. About the only time the label "a rising dread" felt appropriate is when I wandered into Gosgorth and got a bunch of dread for my efforts for the... dreadful atmosphere of the place. In practice though, I never filled up the meter during my playthroughs by accident - I only ever "died" when I did so on purpose on my second playthrough to get the achievement for it.

So overall, I would say that Strange Horticulture is an unfortunately shallow and currently even somewhat frustrating execution of an interesting theme. However, as entries in its category aren't exactly common, it can be a worthwhile experience nevertheless.

One of the best Metroid-likes ever made. Well worth the price of admission.

Really fun core gameplay and solid presentation makes for a promising roguelite. Has a bunch of rough edges and content that is obviously not finished yet, but you're going to get a good few hours of entertainment out of this one as-is, with the potential for a whole lot more in the future.

Really solid roguelite deckbuilder. If you liked Slay the Spire, you will very likely enjoy this. And if you enjoy this and haven't played Slay the Spire, then I can highly recommend that too!