I don't think it's a surprise for anyone how much I love escape rooms. The loop of collecting clues, trying to find patterns and solving puzzles, mixed with a good narrative and some friends, is one of the most fun activities humanity has ever created. Even then, I'm always trying to find new ways of experiencing the genre, and Botany Manor called my attention since its announcement for one little detail: you won't be escaping any rooms here.

You start the game playing as Arabella Greene, a 19th century England botanist, that is trying to complete her book about forgotten and strange flora. Your goal in Botany Manor isn't only found the seeds for each plant, but also collect clues from the mansion and understand what each one of them needs to bloom — and because every pot has an escape room in itself, you need to match really specific conditions in soil, temperature, light, etc. I need to say: seeing a beautiful flower blooming and filling with life that almost-empty house was a way more pleasing reward than just opening a door or a chest.

Overall, Botany Manor was the coziest "escape room" experience I ever had. There's no time pressure and you can explore the clues as many times as you want, establishing itself as a good first experience for new players in the genre. In fact, the game does a constant job of avoiding showing you more than you need to solve the current puzzles, including not having red herring clues whatsoever — for example, if you find a big book, the game will only shows the 2 or 3 pages you need to read and nothing more than that.

Even if the manor is full of mobilia, it's clearly indicated what objects can be manipulated, and they will always serve a purpose (for blooming a plant or expanding the storytelling), a philosophy that the puzzles in the game also follows. Although this helps to create a welcoming experience for new escapers, advanced players can be a little disappointed. Not because the puzzles are bad (on the contrary, they are very well thought out), but that fun of trying to find patterns and uncover what in the "room" is needed for each puzzle is so streamlined that you will be doing it almost by accident.

I need to talk briefly too about all the great accessibility options present in Botany Manor. I always loved how publisher Whitetorn Games take the matter seriously and it shows also in this title: no puzzle is totally dependent of color and there are a ton of configuration that you can use to create a more pleasing experience. My favorite one though was a text overlay that you can use in any clue to read all the written text in a more readable font and background. Even I didn't need it to play the game, sometimes it was more pleasing than trying to read cursive letters with low contrast.

Along with all the clues and puzzles, you will also find documents that will help understand more about Arabella's life and her passion to botany. The game touches in important themes with love and care, but there's not a lot of implications of this story in the rest of the experience. In addition to giving a little more context to the final scene, most of what you will learn becomes little footnotes and very little of this information is used in any puzzle. There's nothing wrong with Botany Manor's storytelling, but it isn't the strongest feature of the title.

The only aspect I really think that can be improved is the hint and clue interface. You don't have an inventory in Botany Manor: you need to write down somewhere to remember specific numbers or you will be walking in circles multiple times to remember everything. But, in the pages of Ms. Greene's herbarium, you can see what clues you have found and match them to a specific plant, if you want. The only utility of this is knowing which information matters for each plant (because the game confirms when you put the correct set of clues), but they are so easy to connect normally that I just ignored the feature completely. Seeing Arabella having actual notes in the book as a pseudo-inventory would be way better.

There's nothing new or innovative about Arabella's quest to fill her herbarium, but Botany Manor is a impressively pleasant experience. Accessible to all types of players, even if you never did an escape room before, its puzzles are interesting to solve and the plants are also cool to see grow. Although there are always something to improve in any game (and here, we could have had a better interface, per example), I just loved my trip to the manor and I'm excited to see more adventures made by this team. Oh, if taking care of my plants here at home was as easy as solving a puzzle...