Botany Manor is a first-person puzzle videogame about a botanist trying to complete her masterwork, an illustrated herbarium titled Forgotten Flora. I play as Lady Arabella Greene, a noblewoman living in 1890 Somerset who uses her estate, the lavish Botany Manor, as a scientific workshop to grow, catalog, and study plantlife. My task is to help Arabella explore the Manor grounds and apply deductive reasoning to the clues found there to grow the remaining plants needed to fill Forgotten Flora. What may be harder than these puzzles is witnessing the frustrating and demoralizing comments hidden amongst the clues about how women scientists like Arabella were treated in the late 19th century.

There are a total of twelve plants to grow from seed to seedling to maturity sequestered around Botany Manor. The conditions needed for each plant to grow are unique. Learning these conditions and successfully executing them forms the basis of twelve large scale puzzles.

Each of the twelve plants are divided unevenly across five chapters. The first chapter takes place in a small conservatory on the Manor’s northwest perimeter. Its single goal is to grow the Windmill Wort, a fiery flower whose petals rotate like the blades of a windmill. To ensure I understand the puzzle solving mechanics and prevent me from becoming lost in the Manor’s scale before I am ready, Arabella is unable to leave the conservatory until she successfully grows this first flower.

All of the tools and clues needed to grow the Windmill Wort are found in the conservatory’s single small room. A brown paper packet contains the seeds. There are an infinite number, so if I ever feel the need to start over from scratch, Arabella only needs to visit one of the many planting stations around Botany Manor to discard her current specimen in a compost bin. This first plant and all subsequent ones begin the same way: An empty pot, a shovelful of potting soil, a seed, and some water.

Coaxing the Windmill Wort to grow is where the puzzle begins. Found in the room beside the planting station is a water heater equipped with a handle to control its temperature. Connected to the heater on a nearby table is a vent. Arabella must use this water heater to make the Windmill Wort grow, but how?

The answer is found in the documents scattered around the room. From a postcard sitting on a table, Arabella sees that the Windmill Wort comes from Sicily. From a diagram of Wildflowers pinned to a chalkboard, she sees that it is a Volcanic Flower. Beside the diagram is a second piece of paper showing a table that lists “Ideal Soil Temperatures for Mediterranean Wildflowers.” This table records the ideal temperature for Volcanic Wildflowers from Sicily at sixty degrees celsius. 

I direct Arabella to place the potted seed in the clay dish near the vent—all set pieces needed to solve a puzzle are marked by these dishes, highlighting their importance among the Manor’s other decorations—turn the water heater’s temperature to sixty degrees Celsius, and open the vent. Steam rushes out, warming the potted seed, which grows in an instant to a full-size flower. Arabella illustrates the Windmill Wort and jots down a brief summary of its growth process into Forgotten Flora. The conservatory door opens and the botanist is free to explore the rest of Botany Manor.

The remaining eleven plants are grown using methods similar to the Windmill Wort’s. The difference is one of scale. The seeds to begin a plant, the tools to grow it, and the clues describing how it should be done are spread out over much wider spaces than the small conservatory. The Manor itself becomes an obstacle. It is spacious and comfortably decorated but a series of locked doors and disrepaired passages transform it into a knotted labyrinth. Arabella must unravel and open each wing one obstacle at a time before she can access everything she needs to grow the current chapter’s plants.

The methods needed to grow the plants also grow in scale and complication. Arabella must use disparate and unusual devices to prompt her specimens to grow. A 19th century camera. A wax cylinder phonograph. A telegraph. For these machines, the puzzle is as much learning how to operate the machine as how its function will affect the plant placed near it.

The increasingly complicated methods needed to grow plants are enabled by the escalating number of documents Arabella uncovers that contain necessary clues. The Windmill Wort, the simplest plant to grow, has three associated documents; the Springdance Shrub, the most complicated plant, has seven. Documents can be almost anything printed on paper, from advertisements to informational posters to newspaper clippings to friendly letters between friends.

Arabella’s most important tool in organizing these clues is the Forgotten Flora itself. She logs every document she finds in the herbarium. I must examine each document, determine which plant they relate to, and assign them to the blank slots in that plant’s herbarium page. When every document is correctly assigned, they become locked in and I know Arabella has found all the information she needs to grow that plant. All that remains is deducing how its clues fit together.

A frustrating thing about all these dozens of documents is how Arabella records them. Instead of copying all the words and images down into the book so they may be perused wherever she happens to be standing, she fills in a chart naming the document and the room where it may be found. This means if I want to review a clue, I have to steer the player character between rooms and try to remember exactly where its document rests. 

I am probably intended to make my own handwritten notes of relevant clues but I have a foolhardy aversion towards this videogame puzzle design philosophy; I know it’s dumb, but I simply won’t do it. The temptation to use the screenshot button to take images of every document and review them from my platform’s top level interface is strong.

There are two instances where Botany Manor puzzles leave me completely stuck. The first involves a hidden room in the library. In a puzzle that feels lifted straight out of 1993’s Myst, the only way to open this hidden room is to press five panels inscribed with animals and celestial bodies in a specific order. This order is deduced by reading fables written down in books strewn around the two-story library. I determine the correct order to read the fables but not how to transit this order onto the panels. Despondent, I look for the answer online. My solution is infuriatingly close but for two transposed panels. I have no earthly clue how that correct combination is communicated by the fables.

A more frustrating puzzle is stimulating the Nightfall flower to grow. A projector in the attic can be outfitted with four colored slides. A series of paintings in the library—inside the hidden room opened by the fable puzzle, as it happens—shows the changing colors of the night sky in different months of the year. I am somehow meant to use several charts and a clever spinning device depicting moth lifecycles in conjunction with the paintings to determine the correct colors to be placed in the projector that will cause the Nightfall to grow.

Despite puzzling over the moth diagrams and other documents for almost an hour, I cannot find the linking piece to determine the correct month. I end up solving the puzzle by inserting every painting’s color pattern in turn until the Nightfall finally grows. Many of Botany Manor’s puzzles may be brute forced in this way but the Nightfall plant is the only time I find it necessary.

Despite these two points of frustration, overall I admire Botany Manor’s puzzles. They are clever and stimulating yet not overly difficult. I am able to help Arabella grow all twelve plants and complete Forgotten Flora in around five hours.

While Arabella explores Botany Manor, I question its nature. At first I am inclined to dismiss the plants maturing from a sprout to fully mature in a few seconds as a convention of videogame design; having to wait weeks or even months for the plant to mature would be greatly disruptive to Arabella’s goals and my attention span. Other phenomena around the Manor give it more fantastic, even magical qualities.

I see it right away through Arabella’s beginning in the conservatory. When I steer her gaze to the door, it fades into an emptiness the color of parchment paper as though it was an illustration blotted from the pages of a venerable tome. Only when the Windmill Wort is successfully grown does the door reappear from oblivion, allowing Arabella to leave the conservatory and explore the entire Manor. This is the only time this kind of reality-altering event happens. All future doors Arabella opens are unlocked with misplaced keys and mechanical devices.

While its magical qualities are difficult to dismiss, the more prevailing feeling that suffuses Botany Manor are eeriness and isolation. Arabella never encounters another person during her research. Paintings of landscapes, plants, animals, and insects adorn almost every wall. The only human shapes seen are silhouette drawings of Greene family members that were in vogue in the 1800s hanging in the main hallway. Letters are found in almost every room and Arabella makes frequent trips to the front gate when the ringing of a bell signals an arriving delivery but there is never a direct, one-on-one interaction with another person. When Arabella punches messages into the telegraph, nobody responds. There are no reflective surfaces where she can see her own face. The human element seems to have been deliberately excised from Botany Manor.

The longer I play, the more this sense of isolation feels deliberate, or perhaps even self-inflicted. Despite her inherited wealth and privilege, the 19th century society in which she lives treats Arabella unfairly because of her gender. This is reflected in many of the letters found around the Manor. Her genuine talent and sincere interest in scientifically studying plants is dismissed with tones varying from patronization to disdain. 

A letter found in a kindling box rejects Arabella’s application to a college, explaining that they only accept “serious scholars” then encouraging her to continue her “hobby” of “tending to your garden.” The letter is dated 1853; Arabella has hung onto it for a long time and based on where it is found has only recently decided to destroy it. Another letter rejects a book proposal but invites her to be a research assistant whose “domestic duties would be much appreciated.” Arabella apparently accepts this offer, as a letter from the researcher found in an upstairs room compliments her ability and promises to “put in a good word for you with the Botanical Society.” The letter is dated 1864; the videogame takes place in 1890. His good word didn’t help Arabella at all.

The only time Arabella’s agency is respected is when the person is being paid, as with a genealogist who creates a family tree that lists the women’s maiden names rather than their married ones. This request actually makes solving a puzzle require a little extra thought as Arabella’s beliefs are not shared by the person who created the puzzle.

A letter from an Aunt Agnes states things most bluntly, setting up a date with a gentleman and the advice that Arabella “make yourself useful in the small duties of life for which you will be loved and appreciated.” It’s difficult not to feel some spiteful satisfaction on Arabella’s behalf when the family tree shows she remains unmarried and childless as she nears the age of sixty. Whatever she was told, however much she was dismissed, she never gave in to the pressures of everyone surrounding her.

Reading all of these demoralizing presumptions about Arabella’s ability carries with them some hope: Botany Manor’s entire premise is to finish Forgotten Flora, her masterwork. There’s a chance that her research will finally be published. The ending is even more hopeful; I never see a person inside the Manor but the final scene shows a classroom set up inside the library and a seating chart bearing the names of six young women. The world may not have treated the protagonist fairly, but times are changing for the better. Arabella leads the way.

Botany Manor is one of my favorite indie videogame I’ve played so far this year. Its puzzles are simple, yet clever and elegant. I do stumble on two of them, unable to discern a solution from their clues, but I feel little resentment about these speed bumps. While its graphical design may appear plain at first glance, it does a wonderful job creating an atmosphere of magic and loneliness. Most affecting of all is the feeling of misogyny laced throughout the correspondence that belies the bright images, opulent setting, and whimsical goals. I never see her face, I never hear her speak a word, and I feel more for Lady Arabella Greene than I do for any other player character who has been my avatar this year. Botany Manor will enrapture any fan of classic 1990s first-person puzzle videogames.